Artist: Carmen Calvo
Title: Oro y redondo del mediodía (Gold and Round at Midday)
Date: 2023
Technique: Installation
Materials: Orange peels and steel wire or rope
Dimensions: Variable
Exterior photograph: © Juan Garcia
Interior photograph: © David Zarzoso
Courtesy of Galería Luis Adelantado (Valencia)
Todolí Citrus Fundació Collection
Donation by the artist
Memory is one of the central themes running throughout Carmen Calvo’s artistic practice. Since the late 1970s, she has developed a distinctive visual language based on the reinterpretation of everyday objects, found images and materials imbued with memory. Through them, she creates a visual universe in which the personal and the collective intertwine, inviting viewers to establish their own associations.
In Gold and Round at Midday (2023), the artist recalls a childhood memory deeply rooted in the Mediterranean landscape and domestic life. The installation recreates a large clothesline from which orange peels hang drying in the sun, evoking a family custom she shared with her father: once dried, the peels were used as fuel in the household stove, providing warmth while filling the house with the characteristic scent of oranges.
This everyday gesture was common in many Spanish households during the post-war years, when making full use of available resources was a necessity born of scarcity. That memory, linked both to domestic economy and to the sensory experience of the fragrance released by burning orange peel, has remained with the artist and re-emerges decades later in the form of an installation that transforms an intimate experience into a shared reflection on time, memory, and the evocative power of oranges and their fragrance.
The use of an organic material makes the passage of time an essential component of the work. As the peels gradually change in colour, texture and scent, the installation itself evolves, becoming a living work whose transformation forms part of the visitor’s experience. Time thus becomes another element of the artist’s visual language, turning an everyday gesture into a meditation on permanence and the transformation of memory.
As in much of Carmen Calvo’s work, the intimate experience transcends autobiography to become a universal reflection on the fragility of memory, the evocative power of objects, and the way memory shapes our relationship with the present. The artist presents viewers with an open work in which every element retains its capacity to suggest new meanings and awaken personal experiences.
Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950) is one of the leading figures in contemporary Spanish art. Since the late 1970s she has developed an artistic practice characterised by the use of everyday objects, photographs, documents and found materials, through which she has forged a deeply personal visual language. Her work explores themes such as memory, identity, the passage of time, and the capacity of objects to preserve stories and evoke emotions.
Through installations, sculptures, drawings and assemblages, Calvo transforms ordinary materials into works of remarkable poetic and symbolic intensity. Her practice establishes a constant dialogue between personal experience and collective memory, inviting viewers to construct their own interpretations from fragments of reality.
Her career has been recognised with the Spanish National Prize for Visual Arts (2013), and she represented Spain at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), among many other national and international distinctions.
