During the last edition of AUTOR Fair, in May 2022, Niki Stylianou, jewelry artist, editor of AUTOR Magazine, coach and gallery owner, awarded an unique artist with an invitation to exhibit her work at the gallery Uni.Versus ArtRoom in Athens.
Rita Martínez is exceptional! An amazing being with an enchanted inner world!
Do not miss the opportunity to meet her in person this coming Thursday the 24th of November, at Uni.Versus Gallery. The exhibition will be opened until 15th of December.
RITA MARTINEZ will be the next Focus Artist at the 20th edition anniversary edition of the contemporary jewelery fair AUTOR 2023, which will take place between 6-7 May.
Her exhibition, titled MALEDETTA PRIMAVERA is an alchemical body of work, conversing directly with the laws of our cyclical ways of being. Quoting her own words:
“Alchemy has as its essential reason the transmutability of common metals towards higher planes of these and even life itself (the philosopher’s stone). In the process, they can be brought back, transformed, and endowed with other qualities. Perhaps that is why the alchemical operation appears as an imitation and reproduction of the original creative process, we do not know, we are about to discover it by letting it flow.
When it flows, bodies are freed from their limitations, their weights, and their corporality to open the way to the deepest: consciousness, disorder, and balance again, a game between the triad of spirituality, magic, and astrology that together change the perspectives between heaven and earth, balances and what we might think we know.
This magic of transformation has been associated to something dark and mysterious since Christianity and hence its negative connotation, as well as white magic that, despite its healing properties and knowledge, was also prohibited.
Black magic, regardless of the use that you want to make of it, is complementary to the white magic since it returns to the cosmic dualism that guarantees the balance of the entire universe. For this reason, although black evokes darkness, in direct antithesis to white, both elements are indispensable to each other to coexist.
With my Damn Spring, I felt like a little alchemist, locked in her magical world, torn between the perception of nature awakening from winter slumber and the darkness, however present, of the world-historical conjuncture. Hence the outburst, rebellion, and the elaboration of a series of symbols (a nest, a bird, a flower), generally full of light and life, which are instead painted black. But they assume a decidedly liberating ‘coloration’ of the inner malaise, of the demons that grip you and that, once expressed, allow again harmony and strength to face the future”.
Text by Niki Stylianou, curator and owner of the Uni.Versus Gallery.
“In 2018, AUTOR was my first high-level experience in the world of contemporary jewelry: an awfully positive and rewarding moment.”