Glenda León. Video installation "Earth" by Glenda León.

Casa Vicens hosts a contemporary art installation by the artist Glenda León

As part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend festival and LOOP festival, the main bedroom of Casa Vicens is hosting an installation by Glenda León, an artist of Cuban origin. This act of patronage is part of the “Compositions” programme, in which contemporary artists represented by participating galleries are invited to conceive and develop a work of art for a unique location in the city of Barcelona. For this edition, Casa Vicens joins the programme for the first time, providing a new interpretation of the first house designed by Gaudí through a video installation that includes one of Casa Vicens’ lines of art exhibits and undertakings that it intends to schedule in the near future.

The work of art hosted by Casa Vicens is part of the “Every Breath” series called Earth, where one can see how our planet, covered with leaves, expands and contracts to the rhythm of a person breathing. It suggests fusion between the biorhythmic functions of human beings and those of Mother Nature and the unity of the human body with the body of the Earth, always connected by the act of breathing. As Glenda León puts it, “each time we inhale, we take something from the world and make it our own, and each time we exhale, we give it back”.

The location of the art work in the main bedroom of the Vicens household evokes the idea of the rest that we feel when we breathe deeply and calmly. At the same time, the appearance of leaves in Glenda León’s video engages in conversation with this space, where Gaudí placed a stucco with a sgrafitto of ferns, interspersed with red fruits and leaves on the one hand and a stucco with a sgrafitto of sugar cane and reeds interspersed with vine shoots on the other.

Whilst Glenda León’s work speaks to us of the bond between the human body and the body of the Earth, between the inside and the outside, Gaudí’s architecture extols the integration of natural forms in architectural structures, as well as the harmonious connection between the interior and exterior of the buildings.