The artist Lola Lasurt repeats a gesture she never saw, but was told about; she learns the steps of a dance that was created to commemorate the gestures of others, which, from a distance, united everyone - people, choreographer and now artist - in a continuous movement of resistance. Some against violence, others against barbarism, and ultimately, against forgetting. An exercise in imaginative reconstruction based on performance and painting, the exhibition will be available in the Sala de Bóvedas room of the Conde Duque Cultural Centre from 23 January to 12 April 2026.
The Barcelona-based artist Lola Lasurt holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, with a postgraduate degree in Aesthetics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is currently completing a Master's at the Royal College of Art in London (MPhil by practice, School of Art and Humanities, Fine Art Research Department). She has completed artistic residencies at HISK (Ghent, BE), Greatmore Art Studios (Cape Town, SA), Frans Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee, BE), La Ene (Buenos Aires, AR), Kunsthuis SYB (Friesland, NL), and HANGAR (Barcelona, ES), and has had solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
"Rehearsal for Deep Song", a series composed of three pieces, is being exhibited in its entirety for the first time at the Sala de Bóvedas room. It reproduces the physicality of dance movement translated into the practice of painting as a performative act. The artist also needed to dance Deep Song before painting. Much of Lasurt’s work is rooted in an event and a historical fact, dance and the Spanish Civil War, to bring it to the present through a recreation that seeks to reflect on its meaning today.
Rehearsal for Deep Song. Frieze I consists of 8 strips, each 10 metres long and 25 cm high, and put simply, while pictorially analysing the entire dance, it attempts to sum up the constituent phases of the choreography.
Rehearsal for Deep Song. Frieze II; Falls consists of four strips, each ten metres long and fifty centimetres high, encapsulating the movement of four distinct falls within the choreography. Graham described Deep Song as an expression of the body’s constant state of tension in times of conflict — the weight borne by women, and also her falls and her near-continuous contact with the ground. This second frieze examines those falls, inspiring the idea of presenting the friezes themselves as ‘fallen’ forms, displayed vertically.
Rehearsal for Deep Song. Frieze III is presented in 1 strip, 10 metres long and 2 metres high, which alludes to the human scale, in which the artist analyses, as she did with choreography, the images of current war.
Alongside the pictorial pieces, a video played on a ground-level screen shows Lola herself attempting to understand the Deep Song dance before painting. It also proposes a performance through contemporary dance to bring that same experience to life through the body.
Lola Lasurt is not interested in the reconstruction of the facts, but rather in the construction of critical meaning. The comparison between the image of reality and the remembered image is one of the principles that a community, collective or society must always articulate in order to establish its foundations in a common imaginary. Therefore, the way in which the construction of a contemporary situation is read through image and another one, which only exists in memory, is interpreted, become actions in which that resistance to forgetting and the construction of a visual language are established as a space to broach possible futures.
