PostColonial Masterpieces at the Bookery Gallerie Group Show

The artists will be sharing, in their individual ways, what the title invokes in response to our recent and current times. We have been coming through Covid and the end of the Queen Elizabethan age towards a possible new dawn, a reset and new beginnings.

Belenguer says about his PostColonial Masterpieces series:

We live in a transitional era where the traditional powers are being distributed and relegated from Europe and North America to the emerging economies in South America, Asia and Africa. Where the established transport, hospitality, banking and financial sector see their share of services being taken away by the new technologies and the sharing economy. Belenguer attempts to reflect this requestioning and changes with the rework of prints of traditional European paintings by Constable, Whistler, Murillo and other painters of Pastoral scenes and resets them in a postcolonial era.

Belenguer is like a hunter who trawls the city for found objects and images loaded with symbolism to construct new narratives. The past emerges into a new future; unopened and enigmatic. He investigates the use of symbols that imposes and reinforces hierarchies in the social strata, its effectiveness in the subconsciousness of the collective, and the political propaganda in the propagation of fear to the enemy and the social classes.

However, the traditional hierarchization of the elites controlling the masses within those territories shall become obsolete in the era of neo-technological empires, social media, AI, big data and connected smartphones.

Bookery Gallerie is an emporium bookshop and a new creative venture in Church Street, Lisson Grove, London. It is situated in the heart of a parade of established antique shops and is right opposite the world famous Alfie's Antiques Market. It will present a programme of established and emerging artists from far and wide and also very much encourage and include local and international artists. Bookery Gallerie has evolved out of a book soiree night which brought together an eclectic range of personalities including many artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, film makers and more, over a period of more than two years.
 

Lorenzo Belenguer is a nonbinary visual artist and arts writer based in London and Valencia strongly influenced by Minimalism and Arte Povera.
 

Belenguer's practice as an artist is constantly focused on the reclaiming: be it objects like discarded rusted metal into the gallery spaces and copies of traditional European paintings as symbols of imperial power. Also into the reclaiming of the place of humans into the natural ecosystem as ancient cultures perfectly knew. He is a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition. Previously, Belenguer ran a community art gallery In London for seven years and a project for London 2012 called Testimonies. He supports the power of the Arts to communicate ways to move into a more compassionate and loving society as we are witnessing in the current pandemic.
 

He exhibited and performed at The Serpentine Galleries, TATE Modern and at the 57th Venice Biennale. The UCL Art Historian Susie Hodge included him as a representative of the Neo-Geometric Conceptualism (Neo-Geo) Movement alongside Jeff Koons and Ashley Bickerton in her latest book. Belenguer's works have been featured in the national media in Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK such as The Independent, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Artforum and The Art Newspaper.
 

Belenguer holds an MA in Artificial Intelligence & Philosophy by the New College of the Humanities in London, and a BA (Hons) in Economics and Business Science by the University of Valencia, Spain.

Bookery Gallerie

20 Church Street, London, NW8 8EP. Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 2.30pm to 8pm