By Invitation 2025
RocioSantaCruz’s proposal for By Invitation 2025 is structured around the dialogue between two generations and two distinct approaches to artistic practice, reflecting the evolution of aesthetic languages, brought together by a shared gaze towards the human and the symbolic.
The core of the project centres on the dialogue between the two artists and on the affinities that emerge from their respective practices, where the languages of painting and photography intersect, alongside a poetic imaginary and a documentary gaze.
From one perspective, Teresa Gancedo stands as one of the essential figures of contemporary Spanish art and a pioneer in establishing a distinctive visual language during the 1970s and 1980s. Her work featured in landmark exhibitions such as New Images from Spain at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1980).
Gancedo’s work unfolds as an intimate and symbolic narrative that weaves together memory, identity and spirituality. Through an imagery rich in signs, the artist transforms painting into a space of personal evocation and poetic resistance against the conventions of her time. Her universe, delicate and enigmatic, stands as a testament to art’s capacity to construct an emotional and transcendent reality.
For her part, Lúa Ribeira, a representative of a new generation that approaches the image as a space of encounter, explores the social and symbolic dimensions of contemporary photography, working alongside young people connected to the outsider music scene in various Spanish cities. Through her photographs, she offers a reading of the present shaped by its tensions: hedonism and nihilism, desire and precariousness, individuality and community.
Along these lines, Ribeira’s practice, deeply collaborative and performative, transcends the notion of the document to situate itself in an intermediate space between the real and the imaginary, where the image becomes a mirror for a diverse and fragmented youth striving to redefine its own codes of expression.
The proposal establishes an intergenerational bridge between two artists who, separated by more than forty years, share a common desire to explore the human through the image. In Teresa Gancedo’s work, painting operates as an interior, poetic and symbolic language; in Lúa Ribeira’s, photography emerges as an exercise in observation and empathy.
