Gathering is pleased to announce Fool’s Spring, Natalia González Martín’s first solo exhibition in Spain, opening on 19 April at Gathering Ibiza. Featuring eight oil paintings on wood and a series of tempera works on vellum, the exhibition presents an idyllic synthesis of bucolic spaces, the female figure, and sumptuous images of fruit. González Martín’s practice is steeped in the art historical tradition of Renaissance and Counter Reformation painting, yet diverts from her previous focus on the darker aspect of Catholicism in favour of a more secular approach.

Selected Works (30 images)

A miniature series of nine tempera paintings on vellum, a material made from sheep’s skin used to produce medieval manuscripts, offers a contemporary interpretation of this archaic technique. During her residency at Castello San Basilio, set in an old Italian monastery, González Martín developed the technique used for illuminated manuscripts - handwritten books produced between 1100 and 1600. Often reproductions of the Bible or prayer books for worship, these manuscripts displayed intricate decorations of small painted scenes, ornate borders and elaborate full-page paintings. These books inform the small, meticulous scale of González Martín’s practice and her artistic tendency towards reinventing techniques. In this series that depicts close-ups of the female form, González Martín applies religious visual traditions to her own images of corporeal female sexuality.

Installation Views (6 images)

González Martín takes her country as her ‘main subject - this longing for that landscape and the sun and the freedom’, she states. Having grown up in Montejo de la Sierra, a village near Madrid, the artist’s Spanish roots are imbued in her practice, manifesting in visual motifs and markers of cultural memory recurring throughout the works. Native plants and fruit, clothing and fabrics related to Spanish folklore and intimate and intricate references paired with painterly flourishes maintain this body of work as a visual aubade to her homeland.

In Illuminations (Fragment #21), particularly, clear comparisons with Peter Paul Rubens’s dynamic compositions and expressive and sculpted human forms are visible. Rather than yearning for a bygone era, the paintings develop an imaginative coalescence of influences paired with González Martín’s individual innovative artistic vision and signature style. Her lusciously baroque paintings of fruit parade an abundance of verdant, colourful vegetation spilling out of the canvas, like overripe fruit bursting out of its skin. Her take on the female nude - casually seated in a grassy landscape surrounded by clear blue skies - indulges in all the tactile fleshiness and mythological narrative of a Bernini sculpture.

The botanical and abundantly arcadian nature of González Martín’s work unites in her portrait of a woman with red liquid spilling down her chest. The enigmatic quality of the artist’s practice leaves the viewer to interpret what the dripping liquid suggests. The works are at once erotic, intricate, forbidden and iconographic - characteristics of Fool’s Spring as a whole.