It is impossible to understand Carmen Calvo’s work as an artist without seeing her in relation to the situation in Spain and her native Valencia during the nineteen-fifties and sixties as the regime of General Franco slowly disintegrated and Spain opened up to the world. The Valencia of that time was something of a cultural backwater, yet it was not immune to the seductions of personal and political change that swept through Europe and America with its culminations in the May Events in Paris and the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968. Yet although she partook of the artistic culture around the margins of the establishment, in movements like Equipo Crónico and Equipo Realidad, access to outside influences was limited. She writes, “From the early days we kept in
touch with people who opened up our eyes to what was happening abroad, such as Equipo Crónica. Through them we met Saura, Millares, Adami, Arroyo, Erró . . . all of them artists who visited Valencia. The national panorama was deadlocked. Seeing a play, The Maids, for instance, or a film like Last Tango in Paris, was not a small skirmish, but a huge battle. This is what marked us: our experiences, our opportunities.” emergence of democracy.

It is this willingness to confront the limits imposed by tradition and the physical qualities of a medium—the materiality of clay or of the black-and-white photograph, for example—that characterizes her work. From her earliest pieces through to the present day, she has been, for want of a better term, a multi-media artist working with all kinds of collage-based techniques. Painting with clay, as she did in the seventies, challenged not just the hierarchy of oil painting as the highest art form but also subverted clay’s use as a sculptural material.

Her collages of the period leading up to the mid-nineties owed as much to Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris as to people like Hannah Höch and Robert Rauschenberg with their disparate elements and internal hierarchies. By the late nineties, however, Calvo began to explore photography as a viable medium for expression and, at the same time, began to explore feminist themes more directly in her work. Increasingly, she worked with anonymous images and objets trouveés and with images of children or family groups. Some she has photographed or re-photographed. Many of the images are from the nineteen-twenties to the fifties and present women in traditional, socially codified settings and poses. Works like Alegría es uno de los adornos más vulgares (Gayety Is One of the Most Vulgar Adornments, 2000) incorporate a hand-colored portrait of a girl with a blindfolded semi-clothed male doll hung from a string in front of her face. Another, No hagas tu como aquel (You Shouldn’t Do It Like That, 2001), includes a photograph of a mask superimposed on the image of a young woman seemingly from a child’s dress-up book where one lays cut-out representations of various skirts, blouses, shoes, and so on, on top of a paper figure. Calvo is questioning not just the coding of clothing, but also the creation of challenges to stereotypes. This form of role-playing parallels her own development out of the constraints of the fifties, yet the authoritative voice—of a parent, of Franco?—suggests limits. At the same time Calvo subverts them by the fairly ridiculous nature of her construction.

Other images feature scratched-out or over-painted photographs, and the use of hair or cloth—typically female symbols—in her collages. The series Sao Paulo (2007) incorporates Hans Bellmer-like, dismembered dolls in sexualized or fetishistic settings that subvert the traditional iconography of St. Paul. Betty Boo (2007) imposes a cartoonlike mask resembling the cartoon figure, Betty Boop, over what appears to be the high-school graduation portrait of a young man of the fifties. Ma Boheme (2008) features a photograph of women classically attired in black mantillas and complex headdresses over which crudely woven string is arranged. Does this suggest the “ties that bind” of interlocked social relationships or something else? Calvo leaves it open to interpretation.

Calvo’s lifelong willingness to confront photography and other media throughout her career make her one of the most important influences on the younger generation of artists in Spain. Her constant evolution across boundaries of representation—“I am a long-distance artist”—has led her through an unusual trajectory since the days of Franco. Her transformation as an artist and her desire to create groundbreaking, transgressing art far removed from traditional concerns and social restraints parallels the change Spain itself has gone through in the past thirty years.