Las bellas durmientes (Sleeping beauties) is the natural continuation to Angeles Agrela’s previous series El flavor de las bellas (The flavor of the beautiful, 2016). Her portraits of women have evolved from passive elements within her compositions to a more central and evocative subject with this latest series.
Sleeping Beauties by artist Angeles Agrela
Now devoid of other props that reference period and place, these large scale works focus on the model, whose real names are referred to in the titles.
Throughout her career Agrela has experimented with various mediums. Las bellas durmientes combine acrylic paint and colored pencil.
The girls, very young or adolescent, appear faithfully portrayed in a situation of some tension between the normalized objectification of the feminine and the evidence of the tremendous potential of this new generation, which is no longer that of the artist. In her words she says: “That is the part that I find most difficult to get in this series; that this is appreciated in small details, in the looks, the selection of the clothes, the hair, in the frames or the forcing of some poses ”.
About the artist
Ángeles Agrela (b. 1966) currently lives and works in Granada, Spain. She has also resided in Naples, Havana, and Berlin.
Angeles is a multidisciplinary artist who works with textiles, video, photography, painting, drawing and printmaking. Her creative process usually follows a thematic line such that a collection of works leads others as parts of the continuing story. Her work has always been closely related to the body and her work is systematically characterized by references to art itself, or the fact of being an artist, or to the experience of a particular kind of artist.
Since 1994 she has held over thirty-five solo exhibitions at private galleries in Spain and the Netherlands as well as in public institutions in Italy, France, Germany and Spain …. and has collaborated in group exhibitions in Switzerland, Mexico, Berlin, Miami, Brazil, and New York.
Last year she was awarded the Premio del Público de las Artes Plásticas del Canal Sur (The Fine Arts Prize of Spain’s Canal Sur television station). And in 2010, she was the winner Premio de Artes Plásticas (the Fine Arts Award) of the government Spain’s autonomous region of Cantabria.
Her work is found in collections such as the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (Sevilla), the Museum of Contemporary Art Union Fenosa (A Coruña), the Spain Collection L’Oreal, the Caja San Fernando Collection (Sevilla), the Fundación El Monte (Sevilla) the Collection Cajastur (Gijón), the Caja Vital Kutxa (Vitoria), the Government of Cantabria Contemporary Art Collection of the UNED, the Provincial Arts Foundation Rafael Botí (Córdoba) and in the collections of the Provincial Councils of Granada, Jaen, Cadiz, Malaga and Huelva.
Ángeles Agrela
images courtesy of the artist and Yusto Giner Gallery
