"ZUSH"; ALBERTO PORTA (Barcelona, 1946). Lot n° 40

"ZUSH"; ALBERTO PORTA (Barcelona, 1946). "Vlundos vosid", 1995. Mixed media on cardboard. Signed, dated and titled on the back. Size: 30 x 45 cm; 40 x 54 cm (frame). Zush was Alberto Porta's artistic alter ego between 1968 and 2001, the year in which Evru, his new character, was born. Defined by himself as ArtCieMist, artist, scientist and mystic, he was self-taught and exhibited for the first time in 1968. That same year he created his own state, an alternative conception of reality called Evrugo, with its own elements and an alphabet of his own invention. In 1975 he received a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation and J. W. Fullbright to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was initiated in the use of new technologies. From the seventies onwards he participated in solo and group exhibitions that made him internationally known. Some of these exhibitions were the Documenta in Kassel (1977), "New images of Spain" (Guggenheim, New York, 1980), "Les magiciens de la Terre" (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989), "Drawing on chance" (MOMA, New York, 1995), "Zush Tecura" (MACBA, Barcelona, 2000) and his retrospective organized in 2000 by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. That same year he received the City of Barcelona award for the plastic arts. He has participated in different editions of the Cologne and Chicago art fairs, and in all the editions of the Basel fair. In his new stage as Evru he presented, in 2004, the exhibition "From Zush to Evru: the second reincarnation", at the Haim Chanin Gallery in New York. His work is present in public and private collections around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Reina Sofia Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the Museum of Modern Art in Valencia and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, among many others.