Press

- Oferta pública / Public Tender will present highlights of her sculptures that have been chosen for their specific ability to elicit questions that address public production and perception of culture

- The artist explores the relationships between sculpture and architecture based on an action in the building designed by Richard Meier in which she returns it to its original appearance

- This is the first major presentation of Rita McBride's work in Spain, made possible thanks to the sponsorship of the AXA Foundation

Title: Oferta pública / Public Tender. Dates: from 19 May to 24 September 2012. Curator: Bartomeu Marí. Organised and produced by: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Exhibition sponsor: Fundación AXA

Oferta publica / Public Tender is the first major presentation of Rita McBride's work in Spain. In this exhibition, McBride re-examines the conceptual strategy made famous by Michael Asher in 1973 at his seminal exhibition at Galleria Toselli in Milan, where he sandblasted the gallery walls removing layer after layer of white paint to reveal its original pre-art brown patina. McBride expands this act of purification at the MACBA by removing most the museum's temporary walls, skylight coverings, and door closures added to the museum architecture since the original opening 17 years ago. The result is dramatic in the way it shows how institutional space is modified by time and necessity.

In a direct dialogue with the building's architect, Richard Meier, the artist has returned most of the museum's second floor to its initial and intentional state. This cleansing of the architecture puts the exhibition space on view as an object of study, putting it at par with the artworks it houses. With this bold intervention McBride has carefully re-constituted an environment in which art and architecture are synonymous. The artist's excavation of the struggle between the inner workings of the museum and its architecture creates a powerful transparency, re-establishing the connection between the public function and the museum's day to day custodial operations.

The Joan Brossa Foundation and MACBA present Els etcèteres [The Etceteras, 1970], the first book of Brossa’s visual poetry to be published since his death. The volume is published by the Centre Internationale de Poésie Marseille with support from the Institute of Catalan Letters

Etcetera, etcetera. This is the phrase often used to conclude any discussion of Brossa’s art, given the multiplicity of registers mastered by this poet, artist, scriptwriter, magician, poster artist, playwright... Amongst all these registers, visual poetry is perhaps the most universal, because it requires no translation of any kind. Thus it is that a French institution, the Centre Internationale de Poésie Marseille (cipM), with support from the Institute of Catalan Letters (Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, ILC), recently published Els etcèteres [The Etceteras]. The book, which is the first anthology of unpublished visual poetry by Joan Brossa (1919-1998) to see the light since his death (the most recent complete volume prior to this was published way back in 1996 and is now impossible to find), is also the first in the genre to appear in France. The work, which forms part of the Habitable Poems series and dates back to 1970, Brossa’s most prolific year in terms of visual poetry, provides a rare chance to see these pieces in the context of their composition – the book. The manuscript, which comprises a series of twenty-eight heretofore unpublished visual poems, has been conserved at the MACBA Study Centre since January, when the Joan Brossa Foundation and Barcelona City Council deposited the artist’s collection, archive and library with the Museum.

Presentation: The presentation of Els etcèteres, a book of previously unpublished material, will take place at 7 pm on Thursday, March 1 at the MACBA Study Centre (Plaça dels Àngels, 8). Attended by: Glòria Bordons, patron of the Joan Brossa Foundation; Mela Dàvila, head of the MACBA Study Centre; Marc Audí, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Joan Brossa’s visual poetry and is the poet’s French translator as well as the author of the prologue to the present volume; and Manuel Guerrero, an expert on the poet’s work and the curator of the exhibitions Joan Brossa or the Poetic Revolt (Joan Miró Foundation, 2001) and Joan Brossa. Poetry and Carnival (Jaume Morera Art Museum, 1999).
Exhibition: To mark this launch, the manuscript of the book will be placed on show on the ground floor of the MACBA Study Centre, where the presentation will also take place.
Selection of photographs of brossa's poems: high-resolution press photos http://www.macba.cat/press/brossa_etc_9578/

In the last edition of the Venice International Film Festival Aleksandr Sokurov won the Golden Lion award for his film Faust, 2011. Accused of practising an aesthetically indulgent cinema, Sokurov's fans regard his works as indispensable for understanding the complexity of post-Soviet Russia. Unanimously acclaimed for the Russian Ark, 2002, Sokurov's filmography has maintained a productive relation with European painting. In the late nineties, Sokurov made Soldier's Dream, 1995, Spiritual Voices, 1995, and Confession, 1998. These three titles, which are part of the MACBA Collection since 2004, are shown on this occasion together with Elegy of a Voyage, 2001, a strange journey that takes us from Siberia to the galleries in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. This last title, which in the context of the exhibition is seen as an epilogue to the Military Series, is Sokurov's first production conceived as a work to be exhibited. The four films share a new documentary aesthetic. In them, Sokurov combines the empirical experience of place with a sombre and spiritual lyricism. The ensemble, lasting approximately ten hours, reminds us that this filmmaker is still associated with a kind of cinema that defies the conventions of museum opening hours.

This press release is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported - CC BY-SA 3.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Dates: 27 January – 20 May 2012. Curators: Jorge Ribalta and Cristina Zelich. Organised and produced by: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).

The Centre Internacional de Fotografia Barcelona (CIFB) constitutes a failed experiment in the institutionalization of photographic culture in the Spanish transition. This exhibition is a contribution to an archaeology of contemporary photographic culture in Spain. The exhibition includes 263 vintage prints and 310 slides. Moreover, the show also features previously unseen documentary material, including posters, magazines and other publications. The exhibition includes photographs by 22 artists: Enric Aguilera, Miquel Arnal, Jesús Atienza, Anna Boyé, Lluís Casals, Pep Cunties, Manel Esclusa, group Extra (Sergi Capellas, Jordi Garcia y Xavier Roselló), Ferran Freixa, Manolo Laguillo, Esteve Lucerón, Xavier Martí Alavedra, Eduard Olivella, Lucho Poirot, Jordi Pol, Humberto Rivas, Jordi Sarrà, Eduardo Subías, Josep Tobella and Mariano Zuzunaga.

From the MACBA Collection, the Museum presents Between the Frames: The Forum, an ambitious ten-year project featuring the voices of 156 cultural stakeholders, an installation acquired by the MACBA Foundation in 2010.

A different version of the work, which was originally conceived as a panopticon with seven cells, will be on show this autumn at the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, where Muntadas first began his project in 1983.

Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983-1993 (2011). Installation and video project (4 h 20 min). MACBA Collection. The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona Foundation, thanks to the generous support of the Repsol Foundation.

"A panopticon is a model used by the penitentiary system. In it, the guard is placed at the centre, whilst all around are arranged the cells and the prisoners. By replacing this guard by the audience, we give spectators a role as guardians of the system. This is a symbolic way of asking the audience to stay alert, to keep their eyes wide open." From 1983 to 1991, with a view to compiling a vision of the artistic system in the 1980s, Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) interviewed 156 figures from the international art circuit: dealers, galleries, curators, museum guides, art critics, the media and artist themselves. In short, all those who mediate between the work and the audience. Muntadas then edited excerpts from these interviews into eight video "chapters", each devoted to a different profession within the art world. The result was Between the Frames: The Forum, a video project originally conceived in the form of a panopticon and first presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (USA). In it, seven cells, each equipped screens simultaneously showing the eight chapters (dealers and galleries are combined into one cell), were arranged around a central space. Since then, the project has been shown in various formats: with the chapters split up into different rooms and offices at CAPC, the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, and in other arrangements at centres in Europe and in the United States, organised by a banker, a philosopher, a historian and a sociologist. In 2010, the MACBA Foundation acquired the installation in its original incarnation (the panopticon), adapted to its exhibition space, and the work will be presented at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) as part of the exhibition Volume. Opening in November, Volume is the first joint show featuring works from both the MACBA and "la Caixa" Foundation collections. Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona) invites spectators to make fresh readings and interpretations of Muntadas' installation, which was long in the making and has undergone constant reformulation. Such reinterpretations are encouraged by the inclusion, along with the installation itself – which is produced according to Muntadas' original idea – of documentation (photographs, diagrams and texts) illustrating the different ways in which it has been presented, whilst the MACBA Study Centre also makes available video recordings of the full versions of the 156 original interviews.

The Joan Brossa Foundation and Barcelona City Council have deposited the poet's collection, archive and library with the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Altogether, this legacy comprises more than 60,000 items, including poems, objects, installations, posters, letters, books, manuscripts, photographs, paintings, magazines and other documents

Barcelona, 13 January 2012. Joan Brossa never threw away even a single piece of paper. He had his own personal order, or disorder, depending on how one sees things. The photographs of his studio are famous, as they show the vast mountains of papers that were piled up on the floor. When a visitor approached his desk, they had to take great care not to disturb a single newspaper clipping or risk a telling-off. For Brossa, a poet in the broadest sense of the word, art was an indivisible whole, and there were no such things as genres. His vast legacy amply demonstrates this view: manuscripts, visual poems, film scripts, plays, artist's books, translations, posters, installations, fine art works, toys, magic tricks, documents and other objects that defy classification. In accordance with the artist's desire that his work should not be broken up, the Joan Brossa Foundation and Barcelona City Council have now deposited this impressive legacy with the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) under a renewable twenty-five year loan agreement in which MACBA undertakes to safeguard, conserve, and catalogue the legacy, as well as disseminating and providing access to the works. Barcelona City Council also provided 300,000 euros to digitise much of the legacy. MACBA is the natural choice, for the Museum's very nature facilitates the transversal readings that are so necessary to understanding the work of this poet; the complementary relationship that is established between the MACBA Study Centre and Collection means that no distinction is made between document and work and enables the legacy to be conserved as a whole. The legacy comprises more than 60,000 items: 50,000 documents (half still to be catalogued), 6,000 books, 5,700 magazines, 100 artist's publications, 130 visual poems (many unpublished), 1,000 photographs, 150 installations and 1,000 posters, amongst others. MACBA also undertakes to increase the presence of Brossa's visual work in the MACBA Collection and, in cooperation with the Joan Brossa Foundation, to select materials from the legacy for presentations of the artist's visual works at La Seca and other centres. Finally, in 2013, the Museum will devoted the exhibition on the Collection to a reading of Brossa's life and work and his influence on Catalan and international art.

- The prize, which will be awarded every two years and will be worth 50,000 euros to the winner, is open to promising artists that have not yet become fully established

- The jury for the first award is formed by Iwona Blazwick (London), Adriano Pedrosa (São Paulo), Christine Tohmé (Beirut), Han Nefkens and Bartomeu Marí

- In order to establish networks on the 5 continents and to raise the profile of art from "non-western" countries, a group of 10 scouts will draw up a long-list of thirty candidates

Barcelona, 28 November 2011. On this day, in Barcelona, Han Nefkens, the Dutch patron of the arts, and Bartomeu Marí, director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), signed an agreement to establish the Han Nefkens Foundation MACBA Award for Contemporary Art. This award, established to encourage contemporary artistic creation, is aimed at artists of any age, nationality or gender that have established a solid trajectory but have not yet been given recognition by art institutions. The prize will be awarded every two years on November 28, coinciding with the date on which MACBA first opened its doors in 1995. The First Han Nefkens Foundation MACBA Award will be announced and awarded exactly one year from today’s date, that is to say, on 28 November 2012.

The bi-annual award is worth a total of 50,000 euros to the winning artist, 20,000 in the form of a fee and 30,000 to be used to produce a project in the city of Barcelona. Through this initiative, the co-organisers, Han Nefkens Foundation and MACBA, seek to help to consolidate the trajectories of artists who have forged consistent careers but that still require support in order to become known on the international scene. The work produced will be shown in Barcelona, in a space outside the MACBA site in order to promote diversification of the "exhibition vocabulary" that MACBA cultivates in order to disseminate outstanding works, in situ in close relation to the urban context, the public space and the metropolitan environment.

The winner of the First Han Nefkens Foundation MACBA Award will be announced on 28 November 2012 at a ceremony organised at MACBA. This event will be attended by the organisers, the jury and the winning artist, who will have a year to develop his or her artistic project ready for presentation in 2013. This dynamic will be continued for subsequent awards, with the result that the prize will be awarded one year and the resulting artistic project will be presented the following year.
One of the objectives pursued by the organisers of this new award is to establish networks on the five continents and raise the profile of art generated in countries considered "non-western". To this end, a group of ten "scouts", scattered all over the world, will each propose up to three artists from their geographical region to the selection committee. From amongst this list, the committee will submit a short-list of five to the jury. The international jury, which may be renewed for each bi-annual award process and composed by experts in contemporary art, will then select the winner from amongst these five artists.

The jury for the First Han Nefkens Foundation MACBA Award (2012) will be formed by: Iwona Blazwick (London), director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery; Adriano Pedrosa (São Paulo), independent curator, writer and art critic; Christine Tohmé (Beirut), curator and cultural activist; Han Nefkens (Netherlands and Barcelona), patron and collector; and Bartomeu Marí (Barcelona), director of MACBA (these last two will be permanent members of the jury, whilst the other three places will be renewed for each award).

China, Japan, the Philippines and Malaysia, among the countries where the exhibition Spanish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Century will be held.

- The "la Caixa" Foundation and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) have signed a collaboration agreement with Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) to organise an exhibition that will be shown in various cities in Asia.

- The exhibition will be held from Autumn 2012 in the cities of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Manila (The Philippines) and other cities in China and Japan, to coincide with the Year of Spain in Japan.

- The Spanish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Century exhibition is an unprecedented collection of important works from the last 50 years by artists such as Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Juan Muñoz, Muntadas, Miquel Barceló and Cristina Iglesias, among others.

- This project will be carried out jointly with AC/E and is a result of the will of the MACBA and the "la Caixa" Foundation to exhibit a selection from their new contemporary art collections, consisting of 5,500 works, in different international centres.

Barcelona, 14 November 2011. Ms. Charo Otegui, the president of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E); Mr. Isidro Fainé, the president of "la Caixa" and the "la Caixa" Foundation; Mr. Leopoldo Rodés, the president of the MACBA Foundation; Mr. Bartomeu Marí, the director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); and Mr. Jaime Lanaspa, the general manager of "la Caixa" Welfare Projects, have reached an agreement to hold the Spanish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Century exhibition in various cities in Asia.

The exhibition will be opened in the Autumn of 2012 and will firstly visit the cities of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Manila (The Philippines). It will later move on to China and Japan – to celebrate the Year of Spain in Japan– until the middle of 2014.

This agreement with Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) has only been possible thanks to the previous collaboration agreement with the "la Caixa" Foundation and the MACBA Foundation, later extended to include the MACBA Consortium, for the purpose of combining their respective contemporary art collections. There are a total of 5,500 works in this common fund and it is one of the most important collections in Spain and Southern Europe about the period from the second half of the 20th century until the present day.

The collaboration between the MACBA and the "la Caixa" Foundation involves holding various exhibitions over the next few years at the different headquarters of both institutions and in Spanish and foreign museums. The first of these exhibitions, Volume!, opened last week at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and will be followed in the middle of December by the exhibition The persistence of geometry, which will be seen at CaixaForum Madrid. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will exhibit The inverted mirror at the end of January, while in November 2012, CaixaForum Palma will present a new look to these artistic works.

Thanks to the support of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), for the first time an unprecedented selection of a hundred works from these funds will also travel abroad together to be exhibited in various cities in Asia.

The curators of the exhibition are Mr. Bartomeu Marí, director of the MACBA, and Ms. Nimfa Bisbe, director of the Contemporary Art Collection of the "la Caixa" Foundation. Both institutions will undertake the scientific design of the project, whereas AC/E will jointly organise the exhibition in various cities in Asia where it will be exhibited and will be responsible for the coordination work.