Antoni Muntadas. Mass media and the construction of reality

Sao Paulo: Estacion Pinacoteca is showcasing (through May 8) Muntadas: mecanismos de la imagen (Muntadas: mechanisms of image) exhibition, with the collaboration of SEACEX (State Society for Overseas Cultural Efforts) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation with Spain.

Commissioned by Jose Ignacio Roca, this sort of transversal cut in the career of Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) explores the artist’s most recurrent themes (how the mass media exerts influence on our perception of reality, build public concepts and naturalize the “common sense”). The display includes a new work, which is being processed, titled “Alphaville.”

The press release issued by the Cultural Center of Spain in São Paulo reads “In the 1960s, Muntadas was interested in the communication ways and sensorial processes related to them. The works dealt with the private sphere, personal relation with the media. In the 1980s and 1990s (this decade structure doesn’t entail a breaking-off but continuity), his work was focused on the communication structures linked to power, paying attention to public authorities. Over the last decade, his look registers an interesting circumstance related to the structures that respond to the capitalizing of fear in extreme situations, which are expressed in architectures and exclusion urbanisms –from walls separating nations to those defining communities in hostile environments.”

Muntadas has been living in New York since 1971. He has worked as professor in the University of San Diego, Fine Arts School in Burdeos and Grenoble, National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the Art Institute of San Francisco and the University of São Paulo, among other. He has worked with the Visual Studies Workshop from Rochester (USA), Banff Center in Canada, Arteleku in San Sebastian, Le Studio National des Arts Contemporains Le Fresnoy (Lille Metropol), and the University of Western Sydney.

In 2005, he received the Fine Arts National Award in Spain. He has also given the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz (Austria), Laser d’Or in Locarno (Switzerland), the Fine Arts Prize awarded by the Generalitat Cataluña, and in 2009, the Velazquez Fine Arts Prize.

He has carried out multiple exhibitions all over the world: Venice Biennial, Paris, São Paulo (Brazil), Lyon, Documenta de Kassel, New York (Guggenheim Museum, MoMA), (MACBA) and the Queen Sofia National Art Museum Center.

In an interview published in Replica 21 (http://www.replica21.com/archivo/articulos/k_l/351_leon_muntadas.html) the artist has spoken about his work: “I’m interested in analyzing the contemporary environment around us. I always say that works are made on contemporary phenomena, I invent nothing, it’s a sort of a look, a revision, a reflection on the environment.”