What do churros, Salvador Dali logo design, Pedro Almodóvar, and 1980s Spanish soccer stars have in common? They’re all elements in “Madrid Me Mata,” the boisterous exhibition by Wendy White that opened this week at Arts+Leisure in East Harlem. In the modest storefront venue, new tondo paintings in customized frames are layered on top of and alongside wall stickers printed with stills from films like “Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” One wall is covered in printed-vinyl images: a photograph of a restaurant window that White herself took in Madrid; covers of an influential cultural magazine published in the city during the mid-’80s; fliers for a now-defunct music club, Rock Ola; an appropriated image of a 1979 work by Ouka Leele, a sort of self-portrait with a mane of lemons. The installation, White hopes, is “something associative — not a didactive narrative.” (Her concern is borderline humorous, given how colorfully packed with dissonant references the show is.) “I’ve never done anything this personal,” White said. “This isn’t my typical style, but it feels really exciting.”
White, who was born in Connecticut and is based in New York, developed a connection to Madrid through a series of solo exhibitions in the city at Galeria Moriarty, a space launched in 1981 by Borja and Lola Moriarty. The duo had seen and bought one of White’s paintings at the ARCO fair a few years back, and included it in a group show before offering the artist her first Madrid solo in 2009. What White slowly realized was that Borja and Lola had deep roots in the city’s Movida Madrileña scene, an explosion of local cultural production following Franco’s death in 1975 — best known internationally via filmmaker Almodóvar. (The husband and wife didn’t broadcast their unique involvement in that mileiu, and it took some digging for White to uncover it: “I didn’t find a website that said, ‘These people are fucking amazing and here’s all the stuff they did.’”) “Madrid Me Mata” is White’s love letter to both a city and her two gallerists, who were forced by the economic downturn to shutter their 33-year-old venture early in 2014.
Jammed together with the visual references to the pivotal arts-and-culture movement are images and iconography relating to the Madrid Real and FC Barcelona soccer clubs. While White did realize that her show would be opening just after the tail-end of the mania-inducing World Cup, she’s quick to note that futbol has previously played an important role in her life and work. Some of the tondo paintings are augmented with stickers of soccer balls; one of the printed-vinyl images is a shot of Madrid Real’s so-called “Vulture Squad,” led by Emilio Butragueño. Other tondos incorporate cut-Plexiglas logos — for El Deseo, Almodovar’s production company, as well as for the beloved Chupa Chups lollipop. (That logo, White explained, was designed in 1969 by Salvador Dali.)
One painting is emblazoned with the expression “Salir de Copas” — roughly translated as “going out for drinks.” It’s one of the things that White appreciates about Madrid: “It’s not just going out for drinks — it’s a necessary part of a culture that feeds on that social space,” she said. “It’s a residual of La Movida. Productive partying: we could do that here, more.”
Wendy White, pictured here, at Arts + Leisure before the installation opening (Photo by: Scott Indrisek)
