At the end of last year the Nogueras Blanchard art gallery opened a new headquarters in Madrid, specifically on C. Dr. Fourquet, a street which also features other gallery spaces such as Moses Pérez de Albéniz, Maisterra Valbuena and the García Gallery, and is fast becoming a dynamic axis of contemporary art in the city. The opening of the Madrid space entailed a rethinking and a reorientation of the Barcelona gallery, ​​which went from having 30 m2 separate exhibition space to becoming just a storefront. Álex Nogueras and Rebeca Blanchard, the two directors of the gallery, opted at first for a joint programming for the two venues, exhibiting a single work in Barcelona (sometimes site-specific) of an artist who at the same time was being exhibited in Madrid. Not entirely happy with the results of this approach, the main drawback of which was that most of the viewing public could only visit one of the two venues and because the artist work in Barcelona was somewhat de-contextualized and subordinated to the Madrid gallery. They decided to rethink the activity of the gallery space on C. Xuclà with a cycle of exhibitions that worked independently, that would last all season and that would be curated by only one agent.

The first fruition of this rethinking is The Story Behind, a cycle curated by Direlia Lazo-one of members of the gallery team, that began last March and runs until December 2013, offering monographic exhibitions by a dozen international artists, both established and emerging. The cycle reflects on the role that narrative and story telling play in the mediation between art work and its perception, and on how much of contemporary art requires interpretation, or an explanation that unveils the core meaning. Consequently this proposition highlights the importance of stories that precede or surround the art work, but at the same time points out the opacity of many artistic works and their resistance to interpretation.

The series opened with Lisa Oppenheim’s Heliograms exhibition (New York, 1975), which takes on board as its starting point a photograph of the sun made ​​in 1876. Appropriating and reinterpreting this footage Oppenheim made ​​several reproductions of this image and exposed it to sunlight for several hours a day over three months, each time choosing a different copy. Due to changes in the intensity of the sun's rays according to the time of day and year, the images were altered unevenly, resulting in a variation of shades of gold and other darker tones. The work gradually builds a poetic allusion to the use of gold as photosensitive material at the dawn of the photographic technique, back in the first half of the nineteenth century, becoming both a reflection on the passage of time and the relationship between change and repetition, and between the original and variation.

The following exhibition of the cycle was from Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda (1980, Nicosia), who with Untitled (Zebra) offered us an enigmatic video originally shot on Super 8 in which she observed a zebra in a zoo, looking from one side to another in a state of high alert. The vigilant animal here is contrasted with the contemplative visitor to the zoo, to which the composition indirectly alludes, and of course the viewer of the video, who reproduces the same attitude of observation. In this case the story behind the image (the story behind) was open and subject to the interpretation of the viewer, as with other works of the artist, but without the references that would justify the visual material which on first reading could seem merely anecdotal or ambiguous.

Programming exhibitions over a yearly cycle with a specific curatorial theme is quite an established approach to which we have become accustomed with spaces like the Sala d'Art Jove or EspaiDos in Terrassa, but is nevertheless quite unusual for a commercial gallery. This is, however, not the only initiative of this type that Nogueras Blanchard has been involved with: Open Call is an annual competition for gallery curators, the Kitchen Talks, small-format conversations between artists and curators, or the Ref 08001 2010 project commissioned by Juan Canela which works as both an exhibition and artist’s book; just some examples of the activities that seek to go beyond the strictly commercial pursuits of a gallery and make an impact in the field of art and contemporary thought. The story behind will continue with exhibitions by Tatiana Mesa (Havana, 2007) and Francesco Arena (Torre Santa Susanna, 1978) and  among others.