Ira Lombardía’s projects focus on the drifts of language and digital semiotics. Her practice explores and challenges topics such as the emancipation and codification of visual language, strategies of appropriation of symbolic capital within the framework of the consumer society and the mediation of artistic experience.

Neo Gods & Hyper Myths is an ongoing and wide reaching project, with a series of eclectic pieces which oscillate from the image and its digital production, to collage, sculpture, video and visual effects.

Neo Gods & Hyper Myths originates from the series Impudens Venus, shown in Untitled-Miami 2018, and in her second solo exhibition in Alarcón Criado Gallery, currently on view in Seville, Spain.

The Venus Pudica (Modest Venus) is the starting point to analyze the construction of female archetypes. These new pieces use a similar iconography, fundamentally referred to Nike, the goddess of Victory. As with the Impudens Venus series, images of classic sculptures (from the Aby Warburg Archive) are confronted and layered with images circulating on the web, commercial advertisements and all kinds of low-res digital imagery.

“The size of the pieces encompassed in the project, mostly small format, contrasts with their conceptual density, product of their hyper visibility and symbolic saturation. Statues, women without heads, winged figures, mirrors, tablets , pedestals, mobiles, fragmented extremities and gestures, accumulate their meanings by playing with iconography, seeking linguistic connections and offering flexible and polysemic meanings, which seek to demonstrate the commodification of the symbolic.

Density is the central theme of this project in which the accumulation of signs -and their difficult reading-, place the artist in a Promethean decoding task that, paradoxically, can only be solved with a subsequent work of coding.

Thus, signs are stacked, overlapped and trimmed. I am interested in materials accentuating their differences; the emphatic eternity that marble distills clashes with the immediacy of the digital image. In this way, I use conflict as a central discursive mechanism.

Antagonism and dysfunctions share center stage in the search for connections and references, in semantic games that become entangled in constructing meanings from opposing strategies. From this perspective, I understand discourse as just another material and I like to think that the flexibility of language slips between the pieces, slipping over the hardness of the marble or blinking in the previewed images at the stroke of the finger”. Ira Lombardia.