Adrián Balseca’s work aims to activate strategies of representation, narration, and interaction in order to highlight cultural specificities of a particular place. It explores the relationship and tensions between industrial and craft practices, revealing a fascination with the historic processes, and the configuration of materials involved in the production of manufactured goods. His work ranges from small interventions to large scale "site specific" actions or video documentations and elaborates on ideas of emerging economies, environment and nature, power, and social memory. ...
MADRAGOA is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2016 in the homonymous neighborhood of Lisbon’s historical center. Since its beginning, the gallery has been an early supporter of a number of international young artists such as Adrián Balseca, Rodrigo Hernández, Renato Leotta, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Joanna Piotrowska, and Yuli Yamagata, whose first productions and exhibition have been produced and promoted by the gallery and often presented for the first time in Portugal. Moreover, Madragoa launched the careers of young Portuguese artists such as Sara Chang Yan, Luís Lázaro Matos, Gonçalo Preto, and Jaime Welsh, giving them visibility on the international scene. From its peripheral location in Europe, MADRAGOA’s project focuses on how to set a deep conversation with the city and its extraordinary potential, setting a dialogue between global artistic practices and local craftsmanship and ideas. The gallery always created experiences of research and production for its artists locally and promotes its program also through the participation in a number of international art fairs, gallery exchanges, and exhibition projects. MADRAGOA is currently recognized as one of the most innovative realities in the Portuguese art scene, while it succeeded to obtain visibility internationally throughout its years of its activity. At the moment, the gallery actively represents artists from Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Brazil and South Africa. ...
