The Olot artist Rita Martorell is starring these days at the prestigious Schlassgoart gallery, in Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), in the exhibition The double meaning of Rita Martorell, in which fifteen of her works from the series ” Sheets”, with suggestive images from photographs of beds and “Bodies”, in which he combines drawing, painting and photography and which has tattoos as the main protagonists. “For me Luxembourg represents the center of Europe, it is a country with many interconnections with the countries around it, and being able to show my work here is very important”, declared Rita Martorell on Friday.
In fact, it is the second time that the Olot artist (born in Zurich in 1971 and trained in Barcelona, Madrid, Strasbourg and Saint-Etienne) has exhibited in Luxembourg: the first was in 2019, when she showed the Cercle Munster a selection of his portraits (the other major area of his artistic production), that time of characters related to Europe.
Now, his exhibition, which will be open until February 4, has been included in the closing acts of the European Capital that Esch-sur-Alzette has held in 2022 alongside Novi Sad (Serbia) and Kaunas (Lithuania). With the support of the Real Cercle Artístic de Barcelona and the Chamber of Commerce of Spain in Luxembourg, the exhibition has been curated by the director of the gallery, the art historian Nathalie Becker, who was the person who took an interest for Rita Martorell’s work and contacted her: “I didn’t know her, but she saw some of my works from the ‘Llençols’ series in a book, she decided she wanted to exhibit them in her gallery , and started the arrangements to achieve it”, commented the artist, who also has a project in hand for this year in Brussels, at the European Parliament. “My relationship with Europe is a path that started a long time ago and is continuing”, said Rita Martorell, who added that “I have always felt a special affection especially for the center of Europe, in fact I was born in Switzerland and I form among other places in Strasbourg».
In the essay she wrote for the exhibition catalogue, Nathalie Becker recalls Rita Martorell’s dedication to portraiture (a discipline in which she has excelled, with works on characters as diverse as Baltasar Garzón or Samuel Eto’o, to name just two), and points out that the artist goes further and “is interested, in the same way, in the human body, one of his favorite sources of inspiration. With pencil, sanguina, watercolor or marker, with a lively and almost automatic stroke, he captures on paper his perfect knowledge of anatomy and offers us, in this way, works that are delicate, moving and, at times, almost sculptural”.
Becker adds that “in this exhibition, Rita Martorell also presents digital works in which she puts photography and drawing in symbiosis. These intimate and sensual images evoke wrinkled sheets with kaleidoscopic folds, from which emanate the imprint of bodies and nocturnal erotic impulses in the manner of Vera Icon».