Press release_A Short Century: MACBA Collection
Descripción de la Exposición
The presentation seeks to reflect perspective from Barcelona, hence its beginning in 1929 with the International Exposition.
In 1929 Barcelona hosted the International Exposition. Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with Lilly Reich, designed the German Pavilion, otherwise known as ‘Barcelona Pavilion’. On the initiative of Josep lluís Sert and Josep Torres i Clavé, the GATCPAC (Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) was founded. André Breton wrote the Second Surrealist Manifesto. In Paris, a group of abstract artists led by Joaquín Torres-García and Michel Seuphor, founded Cercle et Carré. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York and Virginia Woolf published her first essay A Room of One’s Own. This is the cultural context that initiates the new presentation of the MACBA Collection, set out as a chronological path from 1929 to the present. This display includes a number of key works from the Collection, in a series of rooms dedicated to the most emblematic cultural and social moments of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Curated by MACBA’s team, it highlights the changing presentations and experiences of art through the nine decades of this ‘short century’. A dynamic presentation: although presented chronologically, A Short Century: the MACBA Collection will change over time so that each consecutive display can offer a new view of the fonds of the Collection. An open reading formulating variations on the selection of works with the aim of renewing and extending the content of the chronological itinerary and intensifying its didactic intention
The exhibition opens with a room including screenprints by Anni Albers reflecting her Bauhaus period, together with important works by Alexander Calder and Joaquín Torres-García. In the presentation of the successive decades, works by Eugènia Balcells, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christian Boltanski, Esther Ferrer, Gego, Eulàlia Grau, The Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Sanja Iveković, Miralda, Joan Miró, Juan Muñoz, The Otolith Group, Raymond Pettibon, Benet Rossell, Joan Rabascall, Martha Rosler, Jorge Oteiza, Antoni Tàpies and Werker Collective, will be included, among others.
The presentation seeks to reflect perspective from Barcelona, hence its beginning in 1929 with the International Exposition. At the core of the exhibition is a room dedicated to the political context of 1968, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, and 1975, the year of Franco’s death.
The reading of this ‘short century’ concludes with contemporary practices such as Allan Sekula’s series Methane for All – a photographic series made in Barcelona that critiques advanced capitalism, Mar negro by Carlos Aires – made with fragments of wood from abandoned boats and migrants rafts from the Mediterranean, together with the film Hydra Decapita by The Otolith Group, acting as an epilogue.
Exposición. 17 dic de 2024 - 16 mar de 2025 / Museo Picasso Málaga / Málaga, España
Formación. 01 oct de 2024 - 04 abr de 2025 / PHotoEspaña / Madrid, España
