Art from the Collections of "la Caixa" Foundation and MACBA on view at the Guggenheim

Written by Bernardo Guzman Tuesday, 31 January 2012 20:54

BILBAO, SPAIN - From January 31st to September 2nd, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will be hosting The Inverted Mirror: Art from the Collections of ”la Caixa” Foundation and MACBA, a superb selection of works belonging to two outstanding contemporary art collections that represent the most significant tendencies and movements spanning the second half of the twentieth century to the present, such as Dau al Set, the El Paso group, the Vancouver School and the Dusseldorf School. Throughout the Museum’s third floor, The Inverted Mirror offers visitors a tour of 93 works by 52 artists who worked with various media, especially photography, video and large-format sculpture. The exhibition is structured around the points of agreement and divergence between the Fundación "la Caixa" and MACBA collections and highlights the art movements that play an outstanding role in both collections, such as the beginning of Art Informel in Spain and the establishment of objectivity as a current in contemporary photography.

The exhibition title derives from Michelangelo Pistoletto’s work Mirror Architecture, which is featured in the show. The image of a mirror is a metaphor for the processes of accumulation, transfer and interference that are a fundamental part of the birth and development of all art collections. In connection with its title, the show highlights two contemporary art collections located in Barcelona, which are extremely relevant in Europe and are being presented for the first time together outside of their respective venues, in keeping with a collaboration agreement signed in 2010.

Curated by Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the exhibition features photographs, paintings, publications, sculptures, installations and videos by 52 celebrated artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Sigmar Polke, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Wall , Martha Rosler, Michelangelo Pistolletto, Thomas Ruff , Gillian Wearing, Bruce Nauman, Andreas Gursky , Martín Chirino and Antonio Saura , among others.


Scope of the exhibition
The nearly one hundred works from the ”la Caixa” and MACBA collections that make up this exhibition are spread across 2,000 square meters on the Museum’s third floor, a thematic tour in six major sections: Dau Al Set and El Paso, Function and Reenactment in Photography: Landschaft, Function and Reenactment in Photography: the Self and the Other, The Limits of Performance, The Inverted Mirror, and Levity, Gravity and Other Impossibilities.

Designed specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Inverted Mirror exhibition acquires a new dimension in conjunction with the unique, luminous spaces in Frank Gehry’s building.

Dau Al Set/El Paso
The exhibition starts in Gallery 304 with two movements that helped renovate the language of art in Spain after the Spanish Civil War: Dau al Set and El Paso. These and other groups that arose in the 1940s and 1950s joined in the debate that was raging on the international art scene.

Dau al Set (1948–1954) was formed in Barcelona around the magazine of the same name. The group originally consisted of several Catalan writers and artists who promoted the project such as Joan Brossa, Modest Cuixart, Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies and Joan-Josep Tharrats. Later, a series of artists and art critics, among them Antonio Saura, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Jorge Oteiza and Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, collaborated with the movement and stimulated the course of contemporary art in Catalonia. Dau al Set was inspired by the Dada and Surrealist movements and especially by Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Paul Klee.

In turn, El Paso was founded in Madrid in 1957 with the adoption of a manifesto that championed freedom for art and artists, among other issues. The most prominent members of this movement, which broke up in 1960, were well-known figures on the international scene such as Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Martín Chirino, Rafael Canogar and Manuel Rivera. In the founding manifesto, these artists advocated an austere color palette together with the partial adoption of the aesthetic postulates of Art Informel.

Function and Reenactment in Photography: The Self and the Other
In this section, the artists approach portraiture and self-portraiture on the basis of a contemporary perspective and pay special attention to issues such as identity and gender. These works illustrate the way in which the human figure has been portrayed in photography from the late twentieth century until the present. Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing, Geneviève Cadieux, Craigie Horsfield and Vanessa Beecroft are a few of the artists that have addressed this genre from different points of view: Vanessa Beecroft’s Black Madonna with Twins (Right), 2006, is a photograph of people who, in being deprived of their uniqueness, are turned into anonymous subjects. In Gillian Wearing’s photography from her Album series (2003–06), the artist starts out with images of her family to recreate her own self-portrait. On the other hand, in Hear Me with Your Eyes (1989), Geneviève Cadieux photographed her sister over the course of several years in order to capture the emotional intensity of the moment. The section also includes a portrait by Rineke Dijkstra from her Park Portraits series that shows a teenager in a park in Amsterdam who poses for the photographer.

Levity, Gravity and Other Impossibilities
The notion of gravity and levity is the common denominator of the works in this section, which were created on an array of different formats: a series of sculptures and installations by Ernesto Neto , Gego, Tony Cragg, Damián Ortega and Lothar Baumgartner; a photograph by Francesc Torres; and a painting by Ettore Spalletti. A prominent place in this gallery is occupied by Square Reticulárea (1971), a key sculpture in the career of Venezuelan artist Gego, in which she used threedimensional vectors, mesh and planes. Gego’s mathematical roots contrast with the organic nature of Ernesto Neto’s installation Globulocell (2001), made of Lycra tulle.

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~