Rodeo is pleased to present the double exhibition of Patricia Esquivias who lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico and the Hamburg based Ergül Cengiz. In her first presentation in Istanbul Ergül presents older and new paintings. In her early paintings Ergül is using birds as a symbol of migration and escape in a repetitive form in such a degree that the meaning is transformed to motifs. Small paintings of birds in a psychedelic, pop background, covering the sky of an urban environment that seems to be Istanbul and pigeons becoming motifs in a carpet are the main elements in her work. Obsessed with repetition, her combination of forms and colors create a psychedelia in her latest bigger paintings titled “Until I find You” where elements of all her past obsessions come together and starting from the tree of life they expand to infinite possibilities of colors, patterns and signs.Her work brings together traditional with cotemporary elements that every person that leaves a mother country carries with. Coming from a traditional painting backround in Mimar Sinan school of Fine Arts, she plays with elements and ghosts that hunt her in a game in search of an identity.

In the videos Folklore I (2006) and Folklore II (2007), Patricia Esquivias makes a journey in the history and imagery of Spain. Recorded as part of a series of lectures the two works, narrated by the artist build conclusions and histories through cheap material and an improvisational map of signs through which the artist’s thoughts and ideas are directed and guided. We only see her hands and the big amount of found material collected in order to prove her histories. In Folklore I the history of the country’s dictatorship is told through a parallelism between the life story of Franko’s protege Jesus Gil and the history of rave parties in Spain that began slightly 1975, the date when the dictator died. In Folklore II similarities occur between King Phillip II of Spain and the pop singer Julio Iglesias. The isolated Spain of Franko’s meets the warm and hospitable sun of Inglesia’s and mass tourism through a humourous and exciting journey that prove history writing as a democratic and free activity.

This double exhibition creates interesting dynamics between the work of two artists that come from different traditions and question the issue of history and identity making through various social facts.