La Morosa Española

In her second exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Georgia Gardner Gray presents a group of new paintings that look to a peculiar Spanish institution, the cobrador del frac (translated as the ‘frock-coated debt collector’), to examine universal notions of social performativity. Throughout her multidisciplinary practice that incorporates painting, sculpture and theatre, Gardner Gray constructs a boundless world of carnivalesque scenes that host a spectrum of characters lifted from capitalist archetypes, internet subcultures and beyond. Her distinctly contemporary mise-en-scènes reach back into art history and upend its codes, with figures rendered in kaleidoscopic colours exhibiting an anxiety and detachment from their surroundings that speak to a fragile modernity.

The cobrador del frac are a curiosity in Spanish culture. Popularised in the late 1980s and still practiced today, the surreal industry sees debt-collecting agencies sending men (and it is only men – as one cobrador put it, women are not considered “imposing enough”) dressed in eccentric costumes to draw attention to and embarrass debtors into paying up. Working with a theatricality that would likely not be tolerated elsewhere, the cobradors arrive with a sombre expression to stalk their appointed target, dressed in frockcoats, top hats and brandishing a black briefcase with ‘COBRADOR DEL FRAC’ written across its side. Cobradors might also dress as matadors in elaborate bullfighter costumes, as monks, clowns, or even the fictional masked vigilante Zorro. They follow their targets in the street, wait outside their homes and work, sit at the next table in restaurants... Wherever the debtor goes, so does their assigned long shadow a few steps behind. Upon observing the bizarre performance, onlookers will inevitably shift their gaze ahead to identify the red-faced debtor who will be desperate to avoid the unwanted attention.