Julia Llerena

“Page 180” explores the tension between motherhood and artistic creation, taking as its point of departure an intimate, unfinished book written by the artist’s mother. The manuscript’s abrupt interruption on page 180, caused by the author’s illness, reveals the physical dimension of writing itself, echoing Marguerite Duras’s notion of the bodily force that writing demands. Through a combination of painting and ceramics, the project transforms this absence into structure by materially transposing two archives: the intimate one and a theoretical body of reference, drawing on Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood by Moyra Davey. Finally, by translating the acoustic frequencies of language into visible patterns and three-dimensional forms, the exhibition symbolically restores the text’s interruption, elevating a deeply personal experience into a collective one.

Julia Llerena’s (Seville, Spain, 1985) practice unfolds as an investigation into the fragility of order and the symbolic relationship between the object and the space it inhabits. Working across installation, assemblage, painting, and found materials, she seeks to reveal the invisible structures that underpin our perception of reality, with particular attention to the fragment as the smallest unit of meaning. Rather than operating within a representational logic, her works emerge as sensory configurations in which form is the outcome of a series of encounters and disintegrations.

Julia Llerena studied Fine Arts in Seville, Barcelona, and Florence before completing an MA in Research in Art and Creation at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her work has been presented at Mediterranea 16 – Young Artists Biennale, Ancona, Italy; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville, Spain; Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque, Madrid, Spain; LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, Spain; Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum, Herning, Denmark; MuVIM, Valencia, Spain; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Salamanca (DA2), Salamanca, Spain; Espacio OTR, Madrid, Spain; the Embassy of Spain in Tokyo, Japan; Espacio Odeón, Bogotá, Colombia; Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, Spain; and Rodríguez Foundation, Poznań, Poland, among others, as well as at galleries including Sabrina Amrani, Espacio Mínimo, RocíoSantaCruz, and Cibrián Gallery.

Among the grants and awards she has received are those from Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, Spain; Laboratorio Brecha, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico; the INJUVE Creation Grant (2015); Circuitos de Artes Plásticas XXVI; and the Comunidad de Madrid Production Grant. She has also undertaken artist residencies at Matadero Madrid, Spain; Brecha, La Paz, Mexico; La Moissie, France; and La Maison N’Zima, Côte d’Ivoire.