Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), La Caixa Foundation Present ARTE, DOS PUNTOS

Since July 18, Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA) and “la Caixa” Foundation have been showcasing, for the first time in the city, a story written with today’s art to question different episodes of agreements and disagreements between modernity and avant-gardism. If avant-gardism and modernity have been modifying and altering the city’s conscience since late 19^th century to date, ARTE, DOS PUNTOS (ART, COLON) deals with those strains by comparing artworks and documents from the past with contemporary creation and languages.

The show skips lineal timelines and is organized in theme clusters. It’s all about a collaboration that allows for broadening the group of narrations on the recent past and puts us in better condition to cotton on to contemporaneity.

The display features a chapter-like format. There is a chronological subtext, but the story is laid out in theme clusters that have artworks from this time dialoguing with pieces and documents from the past (since late 19^th century). The universal exhibitions from 1888 and 1929 represent the confrontation of Barcelona with modernity and the birth of new artistic facets and disrupting aesthetic proposals. Therefore, they are the starting point of a story that tackles the dialectics between modernity and avant-gardism, until the last one was institutionalized during the 1980s and 1990s. The creation of Fundacio La Caixa’s collection, in the early 1980s, and the genesis of public collections of contemporary art, that came to an end with the opening of Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Contemporani in 1995, clearly illustrate this process.

Some of the exhibited artworks were created by Bleda y Rosa, Eric Baudelaire, Marcel Broodthaers, Joan Brossa, Alice Creischer, Dieter Roth, Öyvind Fahlström, Eulàlia Grau, Craigie Horsfield, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Muntadas, Joan Rabascall, Xavier Ribas, Antoni Tàpies, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Oriol Vilanova, Jeff Wall.

Source: Press release