Asier Mendizabal, Alejandro Vidal and Adrià Julià featured at The Guardian

Artist of the week special: 

Asier Mendizabal

Alejandro Vidal

Adrià Julià

In the third part of our series assessing the top
rising artists from the countries involved in
the Guardian's New Europe season, we look to Spain

• 
• • Skye Sherwin
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 March 2011 17.24 BST
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Alejandro Vidal's El tiempo del odio. Photograph: Galeria Joan Prats

Spain is perhaps not the easiest place to be a young artist. Madrid's 

30-year-old art fairArco has grown into a major collector destination 

in recent years, and the city remains a fairly conservative art centre, 

focused on big names. In spite of mushrooming rent in Barcelona, 

it's where the more innovative art projects are found. Yet there's a 

long way to travel between small-scale independent spaces where 

ledgling talents can show their work and major museums such as 

Macba, with little to fill the distance in between. Moving onwards 

and upwards is tricky, but not impossible, as these three have proved.

Asier Mendizabal is set to make a big international splash in 2011. 

This summer, his work is included in art historian Bice Curiger's 

flagship group show at the Venice Biennale and he's rounding off 

the year with a solo outing at London's Raven Row. Born and raised 

in the political hotbed of Basque country, Mendizabal tackles how 

ideology is given form. Working in any number of mediums, from 

film to silkscreens, engravings and sculpture, his interests range 

from the ad hoc creations of grassroots movements to the intricate 

stories that lie behind public sculpture. He takes a people's monument

to communist figureheads Marx and Lenin as the subject of the 

photographic work Otxarkoaga (M-L). The monument was erected

 in a working-class district of Bilbao using a statue salvaged from the 

Russian embassy at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A number 

of his key works also test political potency with flags, like Not All That 

Moves (Is Red), huge hanging standards in anarchist black and red.

With work centring on the often controlled nature of transgression,

Barcelona-basedAlejandro Vidal has earned a rep as the bad boy

of Spanish art.

His videos and photographs tend to tap into urban tribes and youth

subcultures, with a cavalcade of topless rock chicks, black leather,

grimy T-shirts and tattooed flesh. In one memorable photograph,

Invocation from 2007, a PVC-clad groin gyrates against a provocatively

angled police baton. What Vidal effectively gets at is limp, impotent

stereotypes: these are ritualised acts and poses struck, aped over and

over in music videos, band posters and magazines. For his New York 

debut last year he extended this theme to frontline news. Exploring

media representations of terror, the video Firestorm wed images

of exploding fireworks with the sound of bombs. Meanwhile,

his photo series, A Song Before Sunset, staged a Latin American

form of political protest, the symbolic washing of a national flag

before government HQs.

Barcelona-born and now Los Angeles-based, Adrià Julià's work

explores fantasies of home and identity. Among his best-known film

and photography series is the wonderful La Villa Basque, which

turns a local Californian theme restaurant into a moving, provocative

meditation on the ties of culture. Set up by Basque country émigrés,

it's a rundown place, as Julià's shaky camerawork reveals, more a

suppository of memory than an eatery, with dusty Spanish knick

knacks and battered tabletops.

Julià presents its "stars", including a waiter who performs traditional

dance with oddball hip-hop inflections and a bored blonde waitress

in Basque costume, with the big movie glamour that Scorcese brings

to small-time hoods. The conflation of documentary and big screen

fiction is another theme, seen in an ongoing series of videos centring

on a forgotten film, Inchon. Through cast and crew interviews,

Julià has unearthed the bizarre story of this 1982 propaganda film

that used real footage of the Gwangju massacre in Korea for battle

scenes, with American soldiers stepping in as extras.

• guardian.co.uk ©

Guardian News and Media Limited 2011