There are few artists with such a marked sincerity of approach that they can withstand the shocks of the current art scene. Dominica Sánchez (Barcelona, 1945) is a survivor of an entire collective of women artists who has worked tirelessly to create personal work, far from the fashions of the moment. Her creation – whether painting, sculpture or drawing – is characterized by a rigorous and austere language born from her experience as a daughter of the post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s. A strong and passionate woman; an artist and a mother who has fought against the current to materialize her particular mark, while she fearlessly redefined the work impregnated with her life experiences. Unlike what it may seem at a glance, her lyrical abstraction - which seems to be made from a cold constructivism of an architectural order - is the result of an introspective attitude that formulates experiential correspondences. The great characteristic of Dominica Sánchez's work has been and is that of seeking the base, through a poetics of minimums, with total measure and demand. This reductionist process also affects color, which is framed in monochrome and in the minimized contrast that fights between the mental and the sensual, between rationality and emotion, in an authentic balance of bipolarities.
The retrospective journey presented at the Espai Guinovart Agramunt Private Foundation is a new bet through a selection of drawings and another of sculptures to approach the manifest tension that occurs in its cosmos, always in a counterpoint of opposites: emptiness and full, straight and curved, transparency and opacity, light and darkness. In a coexistence of opposites: rigor and expansion, analysis and feeling, fluidity and stasis, concealment and discovery... they debate in a game of vibrations. Unoccupied places, silent places through which one has the sensation of contemplating the spiritual matter of reality. Hybrid territories where the confluence and alternation of different, but complementary views pass. Peripheries, perimeters and thresholds that not only seek the possibility of understanding the territory, but also of transforming it.
With sobriety and bareness of approach, both her sculptures and her drawings value the essence through a poetics of minimums. A work devoid of iconographic elements that has reached such a formal synthesis that the protagonists are silence and monochrome. For Dominica Sánchez, drawing is the vehicle of thought since this medium is the manifestation that makes freedom of action visible. The contrasts posed by the agile and light curves, drawn in pencil, and the dense and opaque geometries make up a balanced space that shows its interior contradictions. It was precisely her drawing that eventually led her to discover the possibilities of the third dimension. “The body of my work consisted of drawing and it was like drawing with scissors and cardboard; From there the models came out and that's how the sculptures appeared, like an encounter with form in a different way.” Heir to the tradition of constructivist sculpture, its volumes - which are projected in space as if they were drawings in the air in black iron or lacquered in colors - are built through primary structures and elemental forms, recreated through an order in permanent metamorphosis. She values emptiness not as a passive absence but as a space that generates energy.
The Dominica Sánchez exhibition. Border Spaces establishes a close dialogue with the creations of Josep Guinovart; two artists from head to toe, two born fighters and nonconformists who have always defended freedom, as well as vital values and references.

Conxita Oliver
Exhibition curator

Praza Catalunya