The Awakening is a site-specific installation by the artist Antoni Hervàs based on the universe around the underground scene of the graphic artist Tom of Finland (1920-1991). Hervàs focuses on the experience of living together, starting with a residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, with some artists and friends who, since the seventies, shared a community through drawing and helped each other. Emotions, archives, history, experiences are fluidly merged towards a place, towards a series of superimposed layers through colour and drawing. Scenes of both light and shadow of the experiences of the artist Antoni Hervàs in the Tom of Finland community: the Foundation, the clubs, the characters and his legacy.
The touch, the rub and the surface of the jeans transport us to those halls of cowboys who wear jeans, impeccable shirts and dance bachata with hats and bandanas. The small fantastical characters on the bandanas haunt us, they laugh slyly. Fauns, demons, mermaids and tritons merge with the mariachi and the cowboy. Colour is code of non-verbal recognition, of being part of a collective. Hervàs transforms it into fantasy so as to take it to a queer terrain, which also evokes a greater freedom in the representation of identities.
An exhibition of a drawer on another drawer where we are invited to experience friction, pleasure, what is hidden and what is shown in the skin itself.
Antoni Hervàs (Barcelona, 1981) lives and works in Barcelona. He is currently an artist resident in the production centre La Escocesa, has exhibited his work individually at The RYDER Projects, Madrid (2021), OKELA, Bilbao (2021), 1646, La Haia (2017), La Capella, Barcelona (2016); has participated in group exhibitions at CCCB (2021), MACBA (2021), CA2M (2019), and La Casa Encendida (2018); has been resident at Gasworks, London (2018), 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (2017), Hangar (2012) and was awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona d’Arts Visuals in 2016. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona (2006) and Printmaking and Engraving at the Escola Llotja.
Produced within the frame of the programme of “la Caixa” Foundation, Support for Creation’20. Production
With the support of:
Opening hours: Wednesdays – Fridays, from 15h to 19h.
For any visits outside of opening hours, please email us at hello@thegreenparrot.org
