NONTSIKELELO VELEKO

Born in 1977 in the North West Bodibe South Africa Nontsikelelo Veleko was raised in Cape Town. Nontsikelelo Veleko studied photography from 2000-2003 at the Market Photoworkshop and was a trainer in outreach projects in photography. Nontsikelelo worked under John Fleetwood from 2001-2007 with projects such as “Take a girl to work”. She has worked on several photography exhibition showing her work all over the world. Her work presents a strong statement of a younger generation that is loud, self-expressive and daring; a collection of youth she strongly relates to. Such sentiments are evident in the photographs resulting from what she considers to be a ‘collaborative process’.

ADMIRE KAMUZENGERERE

Born in 1981 in Harare, Zimbabwe where he resides and creates art that often explores identity, politics and society. Kamudzengerere, narrates through his work the social and structural issues that have belonged to Zimbabwe’s history over the last decade. They become a stance that reveals how power roughshods over the weak generating a discourse of the inequality in our society . He is a tireless explorer of various media employing both traditional and innovative techniques and this aspect of his artistic process has nurished the way he creates and manipulates his work as a whole. Kamudzengerere’s world and aesthetic are strong, fragile and unique even if they are every changing. His artwork and representations of the world evolve with him.

MO LAUDI

Mo Laudi (Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape) is a multi-disciplinary artist, composer, DJ, Stellenbosch University researcher fellow, the first black South African curator to curate a group exhibition in Paris. He is known for his Globalisto philosophy and his key contributions to Afro-Electronic music. His artistic practice includes experiments with sound as material, sonic landscapes mixing vocals, textures and rhythms as a socio-political critique of society. Inspired by knowledge of African systems knowledge, post-apartheid transitionism and international and underground subcultures, his investigations also find expression through painting, collage, sculpture, installations and video.

PRESS

SAM SAMIEE

From oil painting to IPad paintings, figuration, abstraction, the break of the rectangular frame and the usage of text among other methods. He synthesizes his heavy research on art history, Persian poetry and psychoanalytic theories into a studio practice that employs painting in multiple registers. The characteristics of his installations as extended paintings is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of
ideas. He has exhibited his work at the 10th Berlin Biennale, at Kunstmuseum, the Hague, the Parasol Unit Foundation, Manchester Art Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Liste Art fair, among many other international presentations. Foot-notes to Life, a monograph on his work, awarded as a part of the Wolvecamp

Prize for painting in 2018, won the best Dutch Book Design in 2020.

Amina Zoubir

The concepts developed through Zoubir’s artworks request the notions, the positionings and the tensions of language of the human being/animal/object bodies and its articulation in urban/rural/ fictional spaces. Her installations, drawings, videos, sculptures, photographs, land art are textual and contextual interventions on materials: wax, wood, metals and wall, reveal and deconstruct a behavioral allusion of the unconscious and the imagination of individuals, evolving in a predetermined space according to the sociocultural, ethnopsychical and political contexts. The intention of the created images tries to embellish this moment of distance of the ordinary. A moved and poetic look on the body, articulated by spaces favoring the positioning of who look is looked.

REEM ALFAHAD

Reem Alfahad is an independent researcher and media producer based in Berlin. She is co-founder of the intersectional feminist collective @MixTea, and the upcoming podcast @SideWalkRadioPod, which focuses on the intersection between globalization and gentrification. She was the lead field researcher on the LSE Middle East Center project “Towards an Equitable Transport System in Kuwait” and is a recent graduate of LSE’s Cities program.

EMEKA OKEREKE

EMEKA OKEREKE IS A NIGERIAN VISUAL ARTIST, WRITER AND DJ WHO LIVES AND WORKS BETWEEN LAGOS AND BERLIN, MOVING FROM ONE TO THE OTHER FREQUENTLY. A FORMER MEMBER OF THE RENOWNED NIGERIAN PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTIVE DEPTH OF FIELD (DOF), HE HOLDS A BA/MA FROM THE ECOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIEURE DES BEAUX ARTS DE PARIS AND HAS EXHIBITED AT BIENNIALS AND ART FESTIVALS IN CITIES AROUND THE WORLD, NOTABLY LAGOS, BAMAKO, CAPE TOWN, LONDON, BERLIN, BAYREUTH, FRANKFURT, NUREMBERG, BRUSSELS, JOHANNESBURG, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, BARCELONA, SEVILLE, MADRID AND PARIS.

Okereke’s works oscillate between different media. She uses photography, video, poetry and performative interventions in the exploration of a general theme: that of borders.

pau roche

ARNAU CASAS

Born in Palma de Mallorca and currently living in Barcelona. He was in residence at Pol & Grace for three months. He made a series of paintings and interventions in the rooms, with the use of oil and his own technique where he expresses the deformation of reality from his point of view.

Chromatically it is sustained on the same base, bright and pastel colors treated to suggest vitality and the friendly part of life, contrasted with dark and gray colors, which signify the unknown and the future.

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Sa’dia Rehman

Sa’dia Rehman (b. Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how contemporary and historical images, in public and private records, communicate, consolidate and question ideas about race, power and gender. Through drawing, Rehman separates obsessively and gathers “consumer images”: family photographs, media and historical images of art. In addition to her archive, her main materials include hand-cut templates, Xeroxes, carbon, graphite, erasers, spray paint and ink.

She was the second international resident at Pol & Grace. Apart from her intervention in the headboard of the room, she opened an exhibition, which, similar to the mural, made a sweep of her experience in Barcelona, identifying with a sober and unifying speech, different moments of her days in the city, with transversal elements such as floor tiles or vegetation.

Slomo & Orne Cabrita

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, and currently living and working in Miami, USA. Slomo’s style is geometric, in both abstract and figurative pieces, with transparency and color overlays what characterizes his work, using only spray as his work tool.
His influences are “Venezuelan Cinestismo” and the city of Barcelona with all contemporary street artists mostly from Spain, who shaped what Slomo represents in his paintings or walls today.
Slomo intervened one of our rooms on a night where we also talked about art in Venezuela accompanied by the artist based in Barcelona Orne Cabrita. Together they guided us through a tour of the iconic art movement of their country in honor of the recent loss of one of its greatest exponents; Carlos Cruz Diez.
In honor of the event we exhibited the work of both artists in the lobby´s art gallery. “Retrovisor”, a piece created especially by Orne Cabrita for the talk, is a tribute to The Dissidents group (Soto, Otero, Cruz-Díez and Ravelo) masters of Venezuelan Kinetics. The multicolored past as a reference for a possible future. In the rear-view mirror, the promise that if we were able at some time to tame The Light, we will be able to bring it back. Slomo exhibited his interactive sculptures created through a game of transparencies and sharp lines, which invited the public to touch them and change their experience.

Twee Muizen

Twee Muizen is made up of the Galician artists Cris and Denís. Cris studied fashion design and Denís Fine Arts. They started their artistic project in Amsterdam in 2010, a project that covers various disciplines from mural art to art toys, also through illustration whereby Cris takes care of the textile part and Denís of the pictorial and graphic. The two come from towns near Santiago de Compostela, villages with a lot of mountains, animals and nature, and this is something that can be seen in their work, always very naturalistic and intertwining that beauty that you see in plants and animal forms with the human figure. The exhibition “Folklore” exhibited in Pol & Grace was part of the installation that took Twee Muizen to Berlin with Pictoplasma and also inaugurated the new Spectrumwip art space.

Miguel Ovalle Dizmology

Miguel Ovalle was born in Miami, Florida. Living in a poor neighbourhood of Miami, art became a way to escape, making his own toys out of cardboard, glue and masking tape. In his work he explores the communicative and visual possibilities of writing, it is a constant evolution of the unlikely aesthetic intersection of typography, architecture and technology; integrating these influences to create a hybrid of written communication and three-dimensional structures and environments that transcend.
First official resident at Pol & Grace, he intervened room 403 with one of his sculptures, guided a full moon meditation and presented his geodesic dome Encryption in a grand opening event in the rooftop.

Lauro Samblás

Collage is the central point in the work of the visual artist from  Tenerife Lauro Samblás. Today his three-dimensional illustrations have evolved to become sculptural pieces. In its facilities, conceptual compositions dominated by satin and neon colors, advertising and art come together.
He was the first to intervene in the new creative space of Pol & Grace Hotel curated by the artistic organization The Over ant the support of Montana Colors.
Samblás has transformed the rooftop of the hotel into a tropical tropical Oasis ’from which to escape from the city and take a break, in the sun and with privileged views of Barcelona. Filling it with color, flavor and optimism, the roof becomes an open-air gallery with the energy of the Canarian artist. Being an experimental space in which we want art to permeate all our corners, Samblás’ work was also exhibited in the lobby gallery, opening the way to his own room transformed during his residence.

SPECTRUM

At Pol & Grace Reborn we stand for the talent of our city. That is why we are committed to generate strategic synergies with the main artistic platforms that surround us.
We started with Spectrum WIP, a project created by the illustrator Amaia Arrazola, designer Itziar Luna and the painter Txemy Basualto, curator of the project.
Opened on May 24, the art space focuses on installation art and presents works by lead creators of the local and international scene. Following an ongoing direction of cultural projects based on art, design and music, the Spectrum team distills the talent they have worked and collaborated with for decades creating exceptional exhibitions free of commercial pressures.
The Over, the artistic platform based in New York that runs our creative hub, will work hand in hand with Spectrum WIP to generate exhibitions, talks, workshops, presentations and all kinds of cultural interactions, both in our space and their gallery in the neighborhood of Gracia. Follow our calendar of events to not miss the next collaboration Pol & Grace by The Over with Spectrum WIP.