Ana Navas + Joaquín Segura + Malte Zenses

A booth in collaboration with Sperling Gallery

Departing from the joint representation of Ana Navas (Quito, 1984), Pequod Co. and Sperling will present a shared booth for Art Cologne, showing works by Navas, Joaquín Segura (Mexico City, 1980) as well as Malte Zenses (Solingen, 1989).

These artists will establish a dialogue around abstraction for the booth. However, as open and vague as this subject can be, the complexities of the works of Navas, Segura and Zenses produce a strong, intertwined narrative that expands beyond the plastic properties of the works.

The presentation consists of a series of new paintings by Zenses, a pair of 2-dimensional works by Segura, and a selection of sculptural works by Navas that create a geographical circuit of North and South America and Europe. Connections like this can be easily traced to the beginning and mid 20th century through the development of the vanguards and then the expansion of Modernism all through Latin America, with Josephand Annie Albers being amongst the most famous and relevant figures of these inter-cultural exchanges.

Joaquín Segura’s recent paintings are abstractions of covers of books in which the recognizable elements such as text and images have been suppressed, leaving only color compositions that clearly evoke Latin American Geometric Abstraction. This is not fortuitous, as he has carefully selected books written by authors that have served as conceptual and historical frameworks for collapsed political systems particularly in Latin America but also expanding throughout the world. His hand-woven tapestries illustratered acted documents in which important information is exchanged between governments and security entities, and that speak about these same subject matters.

Ana Navas’ work merges with these paintings by her interest in Modernism and the dream of a future that never became reality in countries such as Venezuela or Mexico (a country in which she has developed a relevant part of her career), where decades such as the 50’s and the 60’s brought a political, architectural, social, and artistic initiative to build the cities of the future. Then, due to reasons intrinsic to the complex nature of these countries, several aspects made these national projects collapse. Navas’ sculptures contain textiles and motifs that echo artistic movements from the vanguards that distort the line between high and low art and that deal with the notion of the future from the persepective of the everyday user.