GALA KNÖRR | THE SELFISH MEME

 Press Release

Pablo’s Birthday is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the US by Spanish artist Gala Knörr ‘The Selfish Meme’. Knörr’s practice’s curious and humorous nature, expresses and depicts her interpretations and remarks on how society navigates within the online and tangible realms, reshaping our habits and pushing contemporary identities into new dialogues. The works selected comment on the cultural practice of narcissism being a conductor for technological advances that have come to control and dominate our lives as consumers. Our identity, our tastes and personality are objects of commerce inside a mirage on the Internet. Simultaneously, social media has a radical aspect to it, due to its accessibility we can share content that is not regularly found on mainstream outlets, yet sometimes making it hard to understand and question our everyday realities. ‘The Selfish Meme’ gives space through painting to radical moments that celebrate diversity and the use of humor as a coping mechanism within the increasingly and rapidly shifting socio-political times, trying to generate glimpses of existing narratives that rewrite our present history through painting, a traditional medium that has depicted through the years our collective history.

’The Selfish Meme’ a title mimicking Richard Dawkins’ ’The Selfish Gene’ explores the nuanced nature of digital images. Bifo noted how we spent more and more time existing in the digital reality as an electronic passerby reflecting our psyche on social networks, similarly Adam Curtis narrated it as returning with a boomerang effect, which by means of isolation and ‘hypernormalization’ hijacks our capacity to create shared meanings, to give meaning to the existence of a ‘realm’ or collective consciousness. Transmitting the sometimes absurd but powerful associative nature of internet images, and how they have transferred their power from an intangible reality to our waking reality, for the series the artist worked on pieces that reflect a wink of an eye into today’s collective representations of the intimate self in a public sphere.

Gala Knörr (b. 1984 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) received her BFA in 2007 from Parsons Paris School of Design (The New School) in France, and her MFA from Central Saint Martins at the University of the Arts in London (UK). She completed a workshop at Madrid45 directed by Txomin Badiola, and was a Visiting Artist Researcher at the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, London (UK).  Knörr received the Juan y Pablo de Otaola Fellowship 2019 at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France), the Basque Government’s Department of Culture and Language Policy Art Grant 2018 (Spain) and the Basque Artist Program Grant 2017 from the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is the recipient of the renowned “Generación” Contemporary Art Award 2020 from La Casa Encendida, Madrid (Spain). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions widely in Europe.