Hugo Orlandini

HUGO ORLANDINI (Santiago de Cuba, 1974).
"To the armies, here victorious / the intelligence / which is always victorious / I dedicate this monument".
Coconut fibre and paint.
Size: 115 x 300 x 1.7 cm.
The work we are now bidding for continues the line of the pieces presented by Orlandini in the exhibition "Victoria", held at TK Galería D'Art between 2013 and 2014. The exhibition already included "Victoria", a two-metre-high sculpture that reinterprets Madrid's Arco de la Victoria - also popularly known as Puerta de la Moncloa, due to its similarity to the gates of Alcalá and Toledo, or as Arco del Triunfo - built between 1950 and 1956 to commemorate the victory of the rebel army against the second republic. Orlandini made a version of the original arch, reducing it to human scale and reinterpreting the original quadriga that crowns the monument, in his version with four tired horses and a seated, crestfallen goddess. In doing so, the artist from Santiago de Cuba sought to dwarf and close down totalitarian regimes. The prayer that gives our work its title, "To the armies, here victorious / the intelligence / that is always victorious / I dedicate this monument", is one of the two that can be read on the frontispiece of the Madrid arch. It is worth mentioning that in 2017 Compromís asked the government to demolish the arch for being "against the memory of the victims of the military coup".
Hugo Orlandini lives and works in Barcelona. His long career as an artist has led him to exhibit in numerous solo exhibitions (2021 Dorado la_minima espacio ambiguo. Valencia; 2013 Victoria Tatiana Kourochkina Galeria d'art. Barcelona; 2013 17ZWEI Zurich, Switzerland; 2011 Ctrl Alt Home Tatiana Kourochkina Galeria d'art. Barcelona or in 2001 Cartonier University of Sociology. Buenos Aires), as well as in numerous international exhibitions and art fairs. In the artist's own words for Utopia126, "The landscape of my work is mainly composed of installations and sculptures inspired by objects of popular culture, as well as information and images published in mass media that I choose for their representational and symbolic possibilities". Orlandini's language is based on the transformation of objects and experimentation with different materials, thus evoking new representations. He uses different media such as photography, sculpture and installations. The Murcia Futuro Foundation and Josep Maria Civit collection currently contains his work.