SANTANDER.- Running from 20 May to 15 October 2023, Centro Botín (Santander, Spain) presents Enredos: Eva Fàbregas, marking the first edition of Centro Botín’s new exhibition programme Enredos. The programme's focus is on artists who have received the Fundación Botín Art Grant, offering them the opportunity to reconnect with Centro Botín's collection, spaces, teams, and audiences. The exhibition proposes a sensory, intuitive and aesthetic relationship between Fàbregas' sculptures and drawings, and a selection of works from the Fundación Botín’s art collection, extending it to the architecture of the exhibition hall and visitors. Beyond the theme of what can be described with verbal language, these affective bonds speak of love, desire, intimacy and making art accessible to different bodies, ages and capacities.

In Fàbregas’ sculptures, air becomes a tangible material that creates volumes and forms capable of changing the perception of ourselves and of space. Biomorphic volumes in a soft pastel palette are in symbiosis, entangled with one another, alluding to biological processes and rhythms linked to digestion, incubation and metamorphosis. They create a duplicity of emotions: menacing or nurturing, innocent or perverse. In essence, they invite us to relate somatically to art – how their texture, their temperature and their rhythm feel – to use our imagination in order to normalise their presence.

As stated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and The Collection at Centro Botín “It has been a pleasure to work alongside Fàbregas in the process of shaping this material fantasy and to envision with her the vitality and immensity of her sculptures and their relationship to the gallery space. In this exhibition at Centro Botín, we can gently lie down on the sculptures, embrace them, synchronise our breathing with their own, their skin as an extension of our own, in an act of communion as beautiful as it is strange.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, co-edited with Mousse, which will also be the first publication dedicated to the artist. It will include texts by curator Chus Martínez and writer Daisy Lafarge, as well as an interview between Eva Fàbregas and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz. Chus Martínez elaborates on Fàbregas’ sculptures: "large intestine-like organisms [that] contain all the negative energies, and [whose] colourful and friendly exteriors represent the triumph of that digestion process." Daisy Lafarge has written “six airs for Eva”, in which she speaks of airs that flow from pink dawns and in-utero breathing to the analogous relationship between breathing and desire as “something we can never satisfy completely or which we can never do without but must spend our lives in its elusive pursuit.”

Upon entering the exhibition, we are presented with a series of drawings by Fàbregas in acrylic that focus and frame specific parts of her sculptural installations, facilitating a play on scales and colours impossible to achieve in the physical space governed by the laws of gravity, the limitations of one’s body, and the materials’ intrinsic properties. As we move into the next space, a sculpture twists and turns, cutting through the exhibition spaces, breaking through the walls of the room. Following the sculpture, we come upon a selection of works by artists represented in the Fundación’s collection who, like Fàbregas, are recipients of the Fundación Botín Art Grant. These include Leonor Antunes, Nora Aurrekoetxea, David Bestué, Cabello/Carceller, Asier Mendizabal and Sara Ramo.

“I wanted to bring together a series of artworks that have a difficult, often unexpected, dialogue with each other that is not related to questions of influence, generation or canon. And this is how I began to envision the exhibition as a large-scale living organism that would follow its own libidinous logic, a desiring machine.” says Fábregas. The collection´s display continues with a series of photographs by Gabriel Orozco, which invites visitors to consider possible perspectives and time scales beyond the human experience, visualizing the supernatural dimension of our daily experience in the world around us.

The last and main installation in the exhibition is a co-production of Centro Botín and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani of Barcelona. Made up of an accumulation of inflatable sculptures on a monumental scale, the sculpture seems to represent an uncontrollable organic growth. It is a symbiotic entanglement between works and bodies, shapes, materials, and colours that come from the fantasy worlds of children's stories and science fiction. It evokes the organs that animate the interior of our bodies if humans were able to shrink themselves and enter them. Fábregas encourages visitors to question themselves on the meaning of breathing, how these beings breathe, what pulse they have, and in what temporality they live. Through the language of breathing, vibration, and touch, visitors can relate and communicate with these beings and transform themselves mutually.