We are honoured to present Dancing in the Sky, Waiting for the Sunset, the first UK solo exhibition by Spanish artist Bárbara Alegre (b. 1976).

The artist shares an intimate and deeply personal body of work created over a period of more than a year following the loss of her parents in 2020.

For this series of paintings, predominately works on paper, Alegre used the make-up and brushes her mother left behind. What started initially as an attempt to keep her close and a way to process the unassimilable void, gradually evolved into a symbolic exploration of what "makes up" who we are, our beliefs, and the links to the world around us.

Alegre approaches the subject with authenticity and grace, making no demands for resolution or redemption. Following a path through grief, loss, love, acceptance and hope, this poignant body of work is a celebration of life, affirming an all-encompassing sense of connection, gratitude, presence and belonging; a tribute to those who walked before us, those who walk beside us and, ultimately, ourselves.

Although finitude is not only inevitable but a condition of life, it remains the one unassimilable trauma sentient beings experience both in its anticipation and in its realisation in the loss of loved ones. Heidegger describes existence [Dasein] as “being-towards-death” and implies that it is by making meaning out of our finitude and heritage we can actualise our authentic self.

When she felt her existence was reduced to grief, Alegre sought comfort and meaning through painting as a way to tackle an unsolvable inner jigsaw, identifying and processing emotions that could not be rationalised or expressed through words or acts.

She turned to her parents’ personal belongings, items they used daily, as “transitional objects” to prolong the sense of their presence but also help her redefine herself in their absence. She was particularly drawn to her mother’s make-up as she felt it contained traces of her; her life, her rituals, her personality, who she chose to be on a daily basis.

Alegre created her own pigments mixing her mother’s make-up with oil paint and fixatives, experimenting with different compositions until the medium was stable. She decided to use make-up tools instead of traditional paint brushes and stay as faithful as possible to the narrow palette at hand. 

As she kept painting, brushes got damaged and the make-up supplies diminished. Little by little, she started adding more oil paint to the mixture and expanded the palette to include vivid blue and green hues. As time went by, there was less of the original pigments and more of her own. The process that started as a slow-paced farewell gradually relied less on the ritual and its “ingredients” and more on capturing an essence, revealing a sense of selfhood but also of deep belonging and connection.

Alegre draws inspiration from old family photographs, memories of shared experiences, a continuous sense of presence but also of displacement. The paintings have a liminal, journal-like, almost cinematic quality; they appear as snippets of thoughts, warping time and blurring the lines between hallucination and reality, vision and memory, self-preservation and abandon. Specific yet ambiguous, as if constantly shifting between a personal and universal vantage point, the imagery is often allegorical, somewhat disquieting but always tender, with a vibrancy and luminosity that arises from a conscious choice.

Alegre makes no attempt at rationalisation, redemption or ontological hermeneutics but a creative appropriation of all that ‘makes up’ the ordinary human experience with all its tribulations and wondrous mundanity.  Alegre’s ‘Dasein’ remains firmly in this world and within the confines of its finitude, but also, deliberately, makes room for illusion, sentimentality, gratitude and a commitment to remain in light.

- For Belén

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