Alberto Porta y Muñoz

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Alenesar Vlod d'Evru (2008)

Alberto Porta y Muñoz, (Barcelona, 1946) is a self-taught Catalan artist known as Zush since 1968 and Evru since 2001.^[1]

Biography[]

Porta was the son of a businessman father and designer mother, both in the textiles industry, he grew up surrounded by mannequins and drawings of clothing designs. At the age of 16, he met avante-garde gallery owner René Metras, who encouraged him to pursue his artistic career. For this support at the beginning of his professional creative work, Porta would later remember the gallerist as his "artistic father."^[2]

Work[]

In his first artistic period, Porta focused on white plaster sculptures, pop collages, and paintings from the lives of his alter egos, Boso and Solomo. In 1964, he shared his first studio with Jordi Galí and Silvia Gubern, in the garden of Galí and Gubern's home.^[2] Together with Antoni Llena and Àngel Jové, they organised small exhibitions there. This active set of artists is later known as the Strawberry Garden group (grupo/grup del Jardí del Maduixer).^[3] The same year, at René Metras Art Gallery, Porta first showed his work in public as part of the group exhibition Presencias de nuestro tiempo ("Presences of Our Time").^[2]

A 1966 exhibition titled Galí, Fried, Porta was considered to be one of the first Pop art shows in the surrounding area.^[4] The following year, he took part in the São Paulo Art Biennial with three works: Boso, Fisis and Solomo.^[5] In 1968, his last year as Porta, he staged his first solo exhibition, Alucinaciones ("Hallucinations"). That same year, after three months in a Barcelona psychiatric ward, he began styling himself as Zush.

His production from the late 1980s to mid-1990s began to integrate digital technology. According to the artist, this work was based on an original concept that he termed the "PsychoManualDigital." This coinage reflected the idea that a human being is inseparable from their own mind (psyche) and body/hands (manual), and the 'digital' is "the ritual and universal prosthesis of the present."^[6] One work embodying this concept is his first CD-ROM PsicoManualDigital, developed in collaboration with José Manuel Pinillo of Mubimedia, which won Barcelona's 1999 ADI-FAD Laus prize. [citations needed]

For the exhibition [ZUSH.TECURA] at MACBA in 2001, he adopted the new pseudonym of Evru. The name is composed of the first four letters of his creation, the Evrugo Mental State (1968-).^[7] On February 23, 2001, by means of digital technology and multimedia representation, Zush made way for Evru to emerge from his own ashes.

He is known for his early use of digital technology for more conventional media such as painting or drawing. He was a forerunner in the implementation and normalization of art therapy, introducing workshops for mental patients in public institutions of fine art such as MACBA (2000-2001) in collaboration with Fina Alert and José Lebrero Stals, then chief curator of MACBA exhibition.

In 2009 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, PORTA}ZUSH, at the Suñol Foundation in Barcelona.^[8] In 2015 his work was featured in the exhibition Del segon origen. Arts a Catalunya (Second Beginning. Arts in Catalonia), 1950-1977 at the National Art Museum of Catalonia.^[9] In 2017, his work Dongda La Gran Campana ("The Great Bell Dongda") was installed in the Mas Blanch i Jové vineyard in Catalonia.^[10]

Biography[]

In 1968, artist Alberto Porta adopted the name "Zush" after being confined to a mental institution in Barcelona, by the then totalitarian regime of Franco. He operated with the pseudonym for 33 years of his career. In the same year he created Evrugo Mental State, his conceptual state which originates thereafter creation of his own alphabet, the national anthem of Evrugo Mental State (composed by Tres), flag, banknotes -Tucare -, etc.^{[6][clarification needed]}

In 1975 he was awarded a scholarship from the Foundation Juan March and William Fulbright Foundation to study holography applied to the fine art at M.I.T. (Boston).

In 1976 he exhibited Después del eclipse at the Vandrés Gallery by Gloria Kirby and Fernando Vijande.^[11]

In 1977, he took part in the , Kassel.

In 1980, took part in New Images from Spain, (1980), Guggenheim Museum, New York.^[12]

In 1986, Scholarship awarded by the D.A.A.D., Berlin.

In 1989, Took part in the exhibition Les magiciens de la terre (1989), organized by Centre Pompidou of Paris.^[13]

In 2001, Zush divested his alter personality that had accompanied him for thirty-three years of his career during the retrospective show ZUSH.TECURA at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) in order to give birth to Evru.^[14]

Work[]

The work of Zush characterizes the building of an autobiographical personal mythology. His own cartography nourishes the accumulation of images that reference to the notions of body, and all its extensions: mind, sex and time, and of the creation of a writing, a personal code –asura– that pretends to express all that is not possible to explain in a rational way. These elements organise multiple parallel universes that keep a delicate balance between what is apparently chaotic and monstrous and rational composition. The will of demystifying the figure of the artist and his diversity of interests has carried Zush to use an extensive spectrum of media that make it difficult to catalog: painting, drawing and graphics to assemblages, photography and collage, the book, the audible recording. Zush has often manifested his confidence in the creative potential of all people, and also in the therapeutic character of the art. For him, any person potentially contains an artist, a scientist and a mystic. How in the work of artists that have worked across the limits between reason and madness, the work of Zush expresses the multiple personalities that populate our consciousness, other realities that reason is not able to express, and that find in the artistic creation a territory releaser that awards to the art a cathartic paper and, is somehow, therapeutic.^[15]

Prizes[]

• 1997: National Prize of Engraving for his innovations in the graphic art.^[16]
• 1999: Prize Laus for his CD-ROM PsicoManualDigital.
• 2000: Press City of Barcelona for the exhibitions Zush. The Campanada (MNCARS, 2000) and Zush.Tecura (MACBA, 2000-2001)^[17]

References[]

External links[]

Official web - Evru.org