Carla Cascales

After a meteoric career in the field of design, where she has received commissions from prestigious international brands, and with only 28 years old, the sculptor Carla Cascales now opens her first solo exhibition in the space CASTELLANA 22, where she shows her artwork for the first time alone.

She had everything to succeed in the world of design but decided to leave it to bet on her art. At only 28 years old, and after a brilliant career as a designer in which she has received numerous commissions from brands such as Nike, Facebook, Aristocrazy, Louis Vuitton or Lacoste, and participated in international congresses in capitals like Milan, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Madrid or San Sebastian, the Catalan artist Carla Cascales (Barcelona, 1989) now opens her first solo exhibition at the CASTELLANA 22 space in Madrid, a long-awaited solo debut where she exhibits for the first time her most personal work.

Under the title Étimo, the exhibition -which can be visited from January 11 to March 2, 2018- shows thirty sculptures in small and large format made in different noble materials such as wood, marble or stone, which had been discarded for industrial use because they were irregular and imperfect, thus rescuing the beauty of recovered elements. On view for the first time will be a series of mobile sculptures conceived during his last grant at the prestigious Varda Artist Residency in San Francisco last summer.

Imperfect and worldly beauty

The search for the essence and origin of things has been a constant in the artist's career. “Étimo means ‘origin’ in Greek. For them, the search for the origin of a word was equivalent to the search for the essence of the thing designated. In our current world, where we never go deep into anything and where everything is fast and instantaneous consumption, this path makes much more sense to me. With this exhibition I wanted to make a small tribute to this reflection, to get to the essence without losing poetry,” says Carla Cascales.

The pieces that can be seen in the exhibition reflect the artist's interest in the architecture of the modern movement, brutalism and minimalism, as well as her appreciation for noble materials, geometries and the absence of ornaments. Japanese culture has always been very present in Carla Cascales' work through two traditional concepts: Wabi-sabi, the valuation of the passage of time and the appreciation of imperfect, irregular and mundane beauty - “a vision of beauty very different from the one we have in the West, where we tend to seek perfection and are horrified by the passage of time-; and Kintsugi, a ceramic restoration technique that proposes to repair fractures with gold and show them instead of hiding them. The object thus repaired is more beautiful and stronger than before it was broken. “The beauty of these concepts are metaphors that can be applied to people: appreciating the passage of time, finding beauty in the mundane or showing our wounds,” comments the artist.
Great carreer

Carla Cascales (Barcelona, 1989) has a degree in Advertising and Public Relations from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a master's degree in Design from the Escuela Superior Elisava, both in Barcelona. As a freelance designer she has worked for brands such as Nike, Oysho, Uniqlo, Diputació de Barcelona, European Commission, Live Nation, Aristocrazy, Massimo Dutti, Lacoste, Martini, Cervezas Alhambra, Louis Vuitton, being awarded with the Silver Laus Design Award for the art direction of the project “European Days of Local Solidarity” of the European Commission together with the Diputació de Barcelona.

Thanks to his evolution from design to art, he has participated as a speaker at numerous congresses, festivals and conferences in important art centers and museums, such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Conde Duque Art Center in Madrid, the OFFF festival in Milan, the BCN Design Museum in Barcelona, the Club de Creativos in San Sebastian or Mr. Marcel School in Madrid.

Prior to his first solo exhibition at WeCollect Club's CASTELLANA 22 space (Madrid), his work has been shown in group exhibitions such as Erotic Stories, Mirat & Co Gallery (Madrid, 2017); Miquel Alzueta Gallery (Barcelona, 2017); White Wall, Espacio 88 (Barcelona, 2017); and MCAM Gallery (Barcelona, 2015). In addition, his work has been selected and published in important national and international media such as Tendencies cultura, Diario El Mundo; Revista Interiores; Metal Magazine; Trendland; say hi to; Fubiz; or FvF, among many others.