The tree woman, the water woman This exhibition explores the work of Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950), whose career began in the early 1970s. In contrast to the academic approaches taught in Fine Arts schools at the time and to established norms, her practice redefines the concept of art. The boundaries of artistic languages ​​and conventions are broken through dislocations that form the basis of a critique of authority and the position not only of the artist, but also of the viewer.

Fina Miralles conceives of artistic practice as imaginative potential, as a critical practice that unfolds not only on the plane of mental or conceptual articulation, but also in the realm of things, gestures, and emotions. The actions and proposals she presents are not from an antagonistic position that pits artist against spectator, but from a conviction that art is closely linked to life. “Being an artist is not a vocation, nor a devotion, nor a profession; you don't know it, but everything pushes you and leads you to be who you are,” she tells us.

Fina Miralles' artistic operations are often based on transpositions, on establishing seemingly illogical relationships between elements that coexist in nature but with which we don't culturally associate. Thus, a simple gesture of transposing these natural elements would seem, beyond its audacity, untenable because it disrupts the artificial order of things. The natural/artificial duality acquires a broader and more paradoxical meaning, since Fina's practice breaks the order imposed by society—a capitalist, dictatorial, and staunchly Catholic society in her youth, from which she distances herself ideologically and materially. However, Fina goes far beyond mere questioning. The gesture of transferring grass to the sea or sand to the field is simple yet powerful. This gesture not only carries a critical and clearly political charge, but also generates another possible imaginary.

Fina Miralles rejects the demands of society and art. Her work contravenes the established roles accepted by a system that demands submission to its conditions of existence and sustainability, suppressing any sign of dissent or dissent. The gesture leaves no room for hesitation, no pretense of doubt; there is clearly another order. Through a photographic essay, she recounts her daily actions, establishing a political operation within the mundane, in which the ways of doing things exhibit their transformative and emancipatory potential. She washes, eats, looks, breathes, touches, drinks, smokes… but her narrative does not confirm a mere set of rules for performing certain activities, but rather a shift toward other ways of operating, toward a radically different construction of knowledge, of our ways of thinking and living.

The tree woman or the water woman is already, in herself, another order, in which she situates herself as an artist and as a human being, but which also inevitably positions us. She not only challenges us, she repositions us not as mere spectators, but as part of those transpositional operations that permeate her work. Translations of nature, translations of our daily lives and, therefore, of society. Translations of the genres of painting, of the orders of art, of languages. She makes us recognize ourselves in her actions. Each gesture, each work, generates interruptions of knowledge and reformulates our perspective: facing the world, other ways of doing, of existing, and of creating.

Fina Miralles' work evokes different ways of generating meaning and existence, of conceiving art. It constitutes a process of existential and artistic transformation, creating a poetic-political imaginary of enormous beauty and forcefulness. Without condescension, it radically transcends what society consolidates. Her gestures alter and divert toward other imaginaries that emerge from small dislocations. Silently, yet resonantly.

En Fina Miralles. The tree woman, the water womanFina Miralles reveals herself in her complexity and diversity, in all the facets she has been as a person and as an artist—one and the same—that constitute her being. These facets unleash the questions she poses to us, questions she wants us to ask of ourselves. The act of being more than one version of ourselves serves as a mechanism for consolidating alternative imaginaries that allow us to define ourselves within parameters of other possible orders.

Photos: Fina Miralles
Zoo images; 1974/2020
© FINA MIRALLES. MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Gift of the artist