PATRICIA DAUDER
Barcelona, Spain 1973
Received the Fundación Botín Art Grant in 2006

Floor, 2018
Wooden planks, graphite and paper
190 x 250 cm
Acquired in 2020

Core to Patricia Dauder’s work is an exploration of memory as a cultural construct.  Using drawing, painting, sculpture, film, or combinations thereof, Dauder unfolds a process-oriented research, whose form reveals the undertakings that led to its realization.

This piece consists of an assemblage of wood planks Dauder gathered from a derelict building and then altered, before placing them back on the floor, to recall that they once formed part of a parquet. Transposed into the exhibition space, they bring together the history of an absent body – the building they were once a part of – and the one of the space it occupies. The leftover of what may have been a drawing, or perhaps a newspaper, enhances the ghostly presence of what appears like the vestige of some dwelling.

Its formal resolution evokes the floor sculptures of such Minimal artists as Carl André, which tend to alter the physical perception of the space. Dauder, however, adds a memorial dimension to this perceptual shift.