This is an exhibition hard, however the current situation is much tougher. The artists Jorge Galindo and Santiago Sierra inaugurated in Madrid 'Los Encargados'. La pieza central es un vídeo donde grandes retratos del rey y los seis presidentes de la democracia circulan cabeza abajo en una procesión de matiz fúnebre. The exhibition, which opened on Thursday 17 January at Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid, runs through March 2, and it seems to start to raise blisters.

“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen —Paris, 23rd of June, 1793

The video shows seven black Mercedes Benz circulating in the Madrid's Gran Via, as if it were a funeral procession. Each carries, on the top, a huge portrait upside down. These are paintings made ​​in black and white, ultra-realistic, oil finish, almost look like mug shots, King Juan Carlos and the six presidents of Spain since the restoration of democracy. The procession walks to the beat of the Varsoviana Soviética, song that was adapted as a hymn (A las barricadas) by Spanish anarcho-syndicalists.

The video, which was shot last summer in August and early in the morning (without, apparently, any authority found out Madrid), is now displayed in the Galería Helga de Alvear, as the centerpiece of the exhibition Los Encargados, an artistic action of Jorge Galindo (1965) and Santiago Sierra (1967), which would point to the "responsible" for the Spanish extreme situation.

Allies from the eighties, when they formed the duo of graffiti Command Madrid, Sierra and Galindo qualify "Los Encargados" as an exhibition "revenge" and "counter-propaganda" that intends to point out, uncomfortable and respond to power with an art performance critic and without gag.

Venue.- Helga de Alvear Gallery. C/ Doctor Fourquet, 12. 28012 Madrid. Spain. T. +34 91 468 0506.
Dates.- 17/01 > 02/03/2013

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Santiago Sierrra, (Born in Madrid, 1966). 1989. Degree in Fine Arts, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain. Workshop at Círculo de Bellas Artes, (J. G. Dokoupil), Madrid, Spain. 1989-1991 visiting student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste (FE Walter, BJ Blume and S. Brown), Hamburg, Germany. 1995-1997 Research Fellowship in the School of San Carlos, University of Mexico, Mexico City. His beginnings are linked to alternative art circuits in the capital of Spain—El Ojo Atómico, Espacio P—although he would go on to develop much of his career in Mexico (1995–2006) and Italy (2006–10), and his work has always exerted a great influence on artistic literature and criticism.

Sierra's oeuvre strives to reveal the perverse networks of power that inspire the alienation and exploitation of workers, the injustice of labour relations, the unequal distribution of wealth produced by capitalism, the deviance of work and money, and racial discrimination in a world scored with unidirectional (south–north) migratory flows.

Revisiting and updating certain strategies characterising the Minimalism, Conceptual and Performance Art of the seventies, Sierra interrupts flows of capital and godos (Obstruction of Freeway With a Truck’s Trailer, 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009); he hires labourers to reveal their precarious circumstances (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold, 2001); he explores the mechanisms of racial segregation derived from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002; Economical Study of The Skin of Caracans, 2006); and refutes the stories that legitimate a democracy based on state violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Irak Facing the Corner, 2010–2; Los encargados, 2012).

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Jorge Galindo, 1965, Madrid, lives and works in London, UK. Jorge Galindo considers that the decisive step in his training was his first contact with the art world at the Talleres de Arte Actual organised in Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, in the framework of which his first exhibition was held in 1988. But even before then he had made the most important choice of all—painting would not be merely an expressive receptacle but a vital attitude. His oeuvre, characterised by a certain gestural abstraction and a persistent taste for large formats, reveals an obsession with collage that has ended up defining both his pictorial action and his understanding of images.

Galindo's early works explored material and tactile aspects rather than the actual grammar of plastic language. Through the use of canvas, burlap and waste material, sometimes even replacing cloth with boards, towels or blankets, the artist approached painting almost physically. Not all found materials, however, could whimsically become supports—only those that already possessed certain inherent plastic and chromatic qualities.

Iconographic references and visual registers would gradually make their way to his pictorial surfaces in what can be described as a sort of iconic phagocytosis. In this sense, his photomontages derived from calendars, old illustrated magazines or advertising and film journals reflect on the purity of the image and its realisation.

Act.>. 01/2013

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