On May 25, 2012, the Galerie Sherin Najjar will present Spanish artist Miguel Rael’s first solo exhibit in Germany, titled «Can I Forget What Happened?» This show will feature a series of site-specific, multisensory installations, glass collages and paintings created in 2011 and 2012.

© Miguel Rael

Rael’s background in painting and performance art provides an expanded framework for his frequently cryptic works which test both the given characteristics of the mediums he employs and the expectations of the audience. His latest collage «Lover’s Game» reflects his long standing interest in blurring the distinction between representation and reality. Working with found objects and appropriated images taken from magazines and the Internet, he intertwines fragmented narrative sequences of loss, failure and desire with objects which expand their reach through the associations implicit in their formal use and meanings.

Rael critically questions the capitalist society in which production, consumption and utopia are part of every day life. The titles of his large scale light piece «We Fail» or the dust installation «What Remains» empower the works by giving them multiple readings and locating the works and the spectator between the private and public experience. Rael himself sees art as an answer to personal questions brought about by spiritual needs. His reduced color palette of dark tones gives his works an intensive enigmatic and ritual appearance. What could, at first glance, be perceived as pure postmodernist strategies, is more appropriately related to biographical, philosophical and spiritual issues.

Miguel Rael (b. 1974, Murcia) belongs to a young generation of Spanish artists that challenge and extend former conceptual strategies. Fluctuating between the fields of painting, video, installation and performance, Rael was trained in a variety of disciplines while attending the renowned University of Valencia.

Source: Galerie Sherin Najjar

Title: Can I Forget What Happened?
Place: Galerie Sherin Najjar
City: Berlin
Country: Germany
Date: May 26 – July 14, 2012

Opening reception: May 25, 2012, 7-9 pm