“Ofrendas y Posesiones” is Naia del Castillo’s (Bilbao, 1975) third solo show at our gallery, with photographs and objects from her latest series dealing with themes of avarice and the offerings that people make.
Through the development of her work, Naia del Castillo makes objects and clothes that revolve around the intentions of each series, and which finally serve as the foundations for her photographic images. Seduction, property, women, the private world or the implications of the object are themes which interest the artist: a silent world, deliberately feminine and symbolic, which leads us towards introspection and a questioning of our day-to-day lives. Her first series, “Atrapados”, was filled with an intimate preoccupation, bordering on the obsessive, in which a juxtaposition of familiar objects and affectionate people lead to various interdependant situations. Later, with “Seducción”, courtship was examined as an uninterrupted ritual of exchange, using mixed and allegorical images: those of the seducer and those of the seduced. With this new series, however, the artist exhibits scenes that deal with accumulation and the desire to “have more of something or more of someone”, as in the possession of emblematic objects or the storing of articles like votive offerings.
In the work La Urraca, for example, the artist speculates about the bourgeois woman who hoards wealth to the point of being immobilized, crushed. The magpie observes, vigilant and dominant, this almost-absent woman, as she is covered in a golden suit encrusted with 12,000 sewn-on pearls. In El árbol del joyero, del Castillo has created a closed shirt, of natural silk with an intense red colour, with four buttons that act as peepholes to feminine desire and sexuality. A tree of engagement rings symbolizes the fact of the transaction. In Las dos hermanas two feminine figures are united, in a manner reminiscent of Siamese twins, in the act of embracing one another in front of two giant blue aprons, again of natural silk; and El Jardín, a very suggestive image that unites reality and illusion.
Two further works complete the series: El lecho, which reveals a woman who sleeps upon skulls/cushions, likened to what primitive tribes would have done in their search for power and domination; and El Hormiguero, a display of quasi-organic tunnels ending in enclosures where food is accumulated and stored, and in whose centre rests The Queen and her larvae.
Naia del Castillo has shown in a number of different institutions, including La Sala Alcalá 31 of the Community of Madrid (2004) and the ATRIUM Museum of Vitoria (2004). In 2005 she realized two solo shows, at the De Santos Gallery (Houston, Texas) and the Distrito 4 Gallery (Madrid). Also during 2005 she won the 2nd Accésit Prize in the sixth edtion of the ABC Prize fof Painting and Photography by Young Artists and first prize at the major exhibition for the off PHOTO ESPAÑA festival.
