Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson

Your country doesn’t exist – Homage to the splash is a new iteration of the project-campaign with the same title. It is an ongoing series of paintings dealing with colour field studies among other, referring Josef Albers series, Homage to the square. The idea here is to unite aesthetically and contently two apparently contradictory attitudes within art history. On one hand pursuing field colour studies that refer to Josef Albers abstract – but relational- paintings, on the other hand represent the comic/pop like figurative drawing we have been developing for this work when appearing as an announcement/advertisement in public space. All in all, having the disconcerting sentence your country doesn’t exist in several languages and therefore introducing another layer into the work, that of language with this particular sentence and its possible relations to colour in the symbolic realm of relationships between colours and nations. In general, the work is making a clear attempt on questioning borders between art and life and different contexts, which among other points out the old modernist debate between the absolute autonomy or the engage position within the avant-

garde movements.

The first 6 paintings of the series were playing with a particular context in mind, a solo show at Artissima the art fair in Turin and a show at ARCO the art fair in Madrid.