Francesca Martí’s ongoing Copper series explores many different aspects of contemporary life, several of which are highlighted in May in Palma at her presentation in the industrial spaces at the new Art & Design District.
Standing at more than three metres tall, Martí’s monumental sculpture Venus in Copper (2022-2024) is like a guardian angel. Cast in aluminium, the artist has tightly bound this large-scale, copper-coloured female figure in cord. Significantly, copper is one of the seven planetary metals linked to Venus, both the planet and the goddess. Elsewhere in the industrial spaces of the Art & Design District, inside a former carpentry workshop, a scaffolding plank leans against the wall. A procession of porcelain figurines wrapped in cotton thread and painted in copper balances on this metal plank. It is as though the figures are nomads climbing a perilous slope. Marti explains that this installation is about survival, equilibrium and confronting danger.
«The large sculpture of Venus represents the senses of power and belief, while the single plank supporting all the wrapped figures shows the fragility of society. But it also represents how we can be united in a moment of fear. The figures all move in a line, in the same direction, with confidence.»
Meanwhile segments of the Copper performance which Martí staged at the Swedish Historical Museum in Stockholm in 2021 were filmed and adapted to her monumental video projection called Copper Transmissions. «The idea of the video is to open up and elevate elements from history for the new generations, as a way to heal through memory,» she says.
«The cinematic Copper Transmissions video discusses the themes of freedom, connectivity and memory, and looks at how we each respond to our own personal history, while paying respect to those who came before us,» writes curator Jonathan Turner in the book Passage and Presence, published in 2023 by DCV in Berlin. «It looks at copper in terms of its value as a metal, but also for its medical, symbolic, alchemical and mystical properties. With a poetic force, Francesca Martí’sCopper project interprets aspects of social justice, migration, history and liberation.»
Along with her three recent Copper projects, Art & Design District in La Soledad in Palma de Mallorca is showcasing Martí’s Quondam (2024) video installation in a former auto-mechanic workshop (see here)
Carrer de Siquier
Soledad Sur, Palma de Mallorca
For info: Nahil Fuente (34) 619 720642
