Kepa Garraza

Garraza works solely in series, focusing on particular events in contemporary history that have been covered by the media extensively.

The artist continues to comment on the dichotomy of true and false in his previous series including, IBDA (International Brigades for theDestruction of Art) and This Is TheEnd Of The World As We Know It, in which he constructs a fatalistic vision of the future based on the reality we face today. Garraza’s works enlighten the viewer to the hypocrisy of the media’s representations of present-day events,while simultaneously predicting its outcome.

His last series is called Power. "This project has been conceived as a reflection about the representation of power in Western culture from classical Greece to the present. Considering that this subject is very extensive and can be tackled from multiple points of view, my approach focuses on the use of sculpture to make portraits of historical leading figures directly related to political or military power.

These figures ranging from Julius Caesar to Vladimir Putin, includes leading protagonists of history such as Philip II, Napoleon Bonaparte or Joseph Stalin. All these characters have been key to understand the history of the Western civilization and all of them have used art as a propaganda tool to serve their own interests. My aim with this project is to analyze the relationships between art and power through history, displaying a visual timeline of images showing the viewer how art has always worked under the shadow of political power.

This close relationship between art and power seems to be a constant until the early twentieth century, when the avant-garde erodes this union on behalf of the autonomy of art. However, this process of breaking with the interests of the apparatus of power has proved to be a chimera. Nowadays the concept of propaganda has changed to more sophisticated forms but it still works in a fully functional way.