Hartmon kicks off to connect emerging art with the public agenda.

Madrid, May 5, 2023. We challenge by default. And contemporary art does too. Art has always been one of the indicators of change in society. At Harmon, we were born to help interpret these social transformations and harmonize disorder. Our mission is to impact society to make it better. That’s why we are launching Hartmon, a new project aiming to connect emerging art with the public agenda.

We understand art as an aesthetic and theoretical result, but also as an active ethical commitment. Politics, technology, social tensions, and planetary challenges form the material of our daily work as consultants and are also inherent to the discourse of contemporary artists. Art is no longer a privilege but an increasingly accessible tool for reflection and transformation.

“Breaking the Mold” is the title of the first exhibition, for which the project’s curators, Javier Aparicio and Victoria Solano, have selected works by Irene Anguita, Gabriel Alonso, Esther Merinero, Jesús Crespo, Cristina Stolhe, and Alejandro Guijarro, which can be visited at our offices. A collaborative proposal that aims to serve as a loudspeaker for artists in the early stages of their careers but with the tools to create a transcendent impact. And it aspires to push all of us to cross bridges.

“The work of these young artists who, through their art, interpret the social realities in which we operate, is our response to the intellectual and creative concerns of the people in the Harmon ecosystem who, every day, pass through and inhabit our office,” explains Carmen Basagoiti, president of Harmon.

“Finding a company like Harmon encourages us to enhance the ability to understand new societal problems through art and the work of artists. We are convinced that in their ethics and aesthetics, we can all find interesting, revealing insights about the world we live in,” claim Solano and Aparicio.

About the Program Curators

Javier Aparicio

Javi (1985, Mexico City) lives and works in Madrid. Trained in dramatic arts, he has developed his career in contemporary art and theatrical and film production. In Madrid, he was part of the Travesía Cuatro gallery, where he was the director and opened the Mexican branch in Guadalajara in 2013. He has worked on art, theater, and film projects in Buenos Aires and was the director of Art Projects Ibiza. Additionally, he has been a consultant at the New York-based firm KCM Fine Arts, focusing on mid-career and emerging artists in the international sector. In January 2021, he opened El Chico in Madrid, a hybrid platform for emerging and mid-career Spanish artists. Currently, El Chico has partnered with Estudio César Aréchiga to open the Ladrón [de Guevara] artist residency in Guadalajara, Mexico, dedicated to the internationalization of Spanish artists through the bridge between Guadalajara and Madrid.

Victoria Solano

Victoria (1977, Madrid) is a consultant specializing in contemporary art projects with a long national and international career in Madrid, London, Berlin, and New York. Until December 2022, she was the director in Madrid of the Berlin-based gallery Carlier / Gebauer. She has also worked in some of the most important galleries on the national art scene, such as Travesía 4 and Pepe Cobo, and internationally, such as Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. She was the coordinator of the first editions of Apertura, the Madrid Gallery Weekend. Institutionally, she has also been responsible for activities at Arco and worked in the special projects office of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Currently, she also advises Spanish and international collectors as an art advisor.

About the Artists Participating in the Exhibition “Breaking the Mold”

Gabriel Alonso

Gabriel (Madrid, 1986) is a visual artist trained in Madrid, Berlin, and New York. In 2020, he founded the Institute of Postnatural Studies, a research and creation platform from which to discuss new approaches to artistic practice through political ecology, postnatural aesthetics, and new ethics of creation that contribute to the definitive dissolution of the nature-culture dichotomy. His work has been exhibited in various galleries and international exhibitions, such as Pradiauto 2022 (Madrid), Matadero 2019 (Madrid), John Doe Gallery 2018 (New York), IIAF2018 (New York), Poor Media Leuven 2016 (Belgium), Espacio Las Aguas 2015 (Madrid), Mila Gallery 2014 (Berlin), among others. He has been an assistant professor at Barnard College of Columbia University (New York) and in the Master of Advanced Architecture at ETSAM, and has given several lectures at various international institutions, museums, and universities. In 2016, he was awarded one of the prestigious Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts grants.

Irene Anguita

Irene (Córdoba, 1997) holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid (2015-2019) and a Master’s in Research in Art and Creation, also from the Complutense University (2020). She currently resides in Córdoba. Her work is a reflection of her own time, a painting that bears witness to what happens to us daily. In her recent work, we observe the artist’s interest in the relationship between the technological and the physical, a relationship on which she focuses her research. How does the sheer number of images we consume each day influence us? And how can this affect contemporary artistic practice? Irene’s work emerges as a stand against the subjugation of images we suffer, as an exercise that asks us for pause and reflection on what we are observing. It arises as a translation of the light and dynamism of those images into the pictorial medium—ultimately reflecting the union between new technologies and the tradition in painting.

Esther Merinero

Esther (1994, Madrid) studied for a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Arts and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art with a scholarship from Fundación La Caixa. Esther’s work focuses on the small details that give meaning to the events of our daily lives and turn them into memories and fields of possibility, thus proposing parallel narratives that stem from reality. Objects become collections, lists of obsessions, and the emotional weight they acquire gives them an equivalent weight to that of a subject. These objects are another type of body that can interact and feel but can also escape or be lost. If they are lost or escape through the holes, they are irreplaceable, as they serve as objects but also as shields. And once the shield disappears, the void left behind is revealed: the hole. This interest responds to the complex relationship between volumes formally separated but emotionally united, relating them within fantastic scenarios.

Jesús Crespo

Jesús (Madrid, 1989), holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, and finished his studies in London at Camberwell College of Arts in 2016. He completed a Master’s in Research, Art, and Creation at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2017. His work has been exhibited in various European cities such as London, Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Antwerp, and Seville, among others. He currently resides in London. His work revolves around the possibilities of painting as a medium and an end; sometimes it is painting that leads him to conclusions, and other times it is his conclusions that create the painting. Jesús starts from collage and develops a thought/painting process based on found images. He reorganizes elements through pictorial action, resulting in a series of masses, planes, and surfaces subjected to a liquid and malleable condition. This condition allows him to play in different dimensional spaces where confused areas emerge from slips, drifts, and dissonances in form and color.

Alejandro Guijarro

Alex (Madrid 1979) is a visual artist living between Madrid and London. He studied at the Royal College of Art (London), where he graduated with a Master’s in Photography. His work investigates spatial relationships within photographic representation and its intersection with painting and drawing. Guijarro has exhibited his work in Europe, the USA, and Asia. His recent exhibitions include [LAPSO], El Chico (Madrid 2022), Remnants, Galerie Huit (Hong Kong 2018), Lead, Tristan Hoare (London 2018), Insights: New Approaches to Photography since 2000, PHOTOFAIRS (San Francisco 2017), Momentum, Marlborough Gallery (Madrid 2015), Festival Images (Vevey 2014), New Order: British Art Today, Saatchi Gallery (London 2014), Blackboard – Art from teaching/learning from art, Artipelag Konsthall (Stockholm 2014), Photography 2.0, Photoespaña (Madrid 2014). His work has been nominated in competitions such as the Prix Pictet Award (2015), Man Photography Prize (2009), and the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie à Hyères (2011), and has been published in media such as The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Artnet, ABC, and El Mundo, among others.

Cristina Stolhe

Cristina (Pontevedra, 1993) began her studies in 2013 in Art History at the University of Santiago de Compostela. However, in her last year of college, she realized that her creative concerns surpassed any aspirations in the world of cultural and artistic management, and unconsciously sought to focus on the “photographic” language –which speaks naturally– a path materialized in her first book, Random Pictures Book (RPB), published by Terrranova. Cristina does not identify as a photographer; rather, she uses photography as a medium-channel, seeking to approach a more material-pictorial plane where textures/subjects/figures and ideas-themes such as loneliness, the human condition, irony, time, or death obsess the author. An impulse– a need– expressed in what we understand as photographs, in an infinite album, and in a constant search that also questions what the photographic medium is and what we understand by photography and its codes. The medium (a camera) is less important than what one observes (intervention).