Nathalie Rey

Nathalie Rey is a French artist living and working between Barcelona and Berlin. She has a long academic career in the field of Humanities, with a Master’s in Architecture, a Degree in Literature, and Fine Arts, before dedicating herself to artistic creation. Her work, technically eclectic, has followed a narrative thread for years, oscillating between episodes of contemporary history and personal events. Thus, a disturbing parallel is generated between the dramas of Humanity and individual wounds.

At the same time, she adopts an anti-mercantile position since she relates and expresses through an ironic pop aesthetic characterized by the artistic re-use of waste and materials of industrial origin, the attraction / repulsion that the human and ecological tragedies inherent in our society arouse in her.

Lately she has been showing her work in solo exhibitions worldwide: at le Chai, France, GlogauAIR Project Space, Kastanien, SomoS Art House, Backhaus Projects, Scope and Vorfluter, Berlin, the Centre de Lectura in Reus, Spain and the Fàbrica de les Arts Roca Umbert in Granollers, Spain, the Ideograma Fundation and Espronceda Center for Art and Culture in Barcelona, Alalimón, Chiquita Room, Esther Montoriol and The Over galleries, La Grey gallery in Tarragona, Spain and the Woldt gallery (London / Hamburg).

She participated in the festivals Art Photo Bcn, ArtsLibris, Panoràmic and Loop (Barcelona, Spain), MAU Mostra d’Art Urbà and Nit d’audiovisuals experimentals (F.A. Roca Umbert), Cahors Juin Jardins (France), Spokoj (Poland), Ortstermin and Berlin Art Week among others.

She is a resident at the Espai d’Arts Roca Umbert since 2018. She has stayed as well in the residencies Nectar and CACIS Forn de la calç (Catalonia), AADK Centro Negra (Murcia), JOYA: AIR (Almeria), Hors Saison (France), GlogauAIR, Somos, Scope(Berlin) and has been accepted at Gate 27 (Istanbul) for the beginning of 2024.

During her residency at Gate 27, the artist will work on the research phase for her project inspired by the theories of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, an attempt to materialize the interaction between the different elements that participate in the cycle of life and death of humans highlighting the fundamental role of plants with the contribution of the ecological transition carried out by many municipalities through the ecosystem of cemeteries thanatopraxy, a specific flora and fauna. Thus, we can realize that all the elements that intervene in this ecosystem, whether tombs, corpses, vegetation, animals, cleaning products, visitors, rites or even our understanding of death, are intimately linked, depend on each other, and modify the entire biological system.