Collectable

Twentieth Century Leading Artists

'Poetic Intention' is rehung

Brassaï, Marcel Broodthaers, Joan Brossa and Nancy Spero are entering the Collection galleries as part of the exhibition MACBA Collection: Prelude. Poetic Intention, where they will establish a dialogue with other works in the exhibition and create new resonances and relational universes. These are leading artists from the twentieth century who explored the different structures of power associated with language.

In the 1930s, Brassaï focused on the language of the collective unconscious, capturing with his camera the graffiti of the street of Paris and collaborating with the Surrealists. Also influenced by Surrealism, Marcel Broodthaers began writing poetry, only to become aware, from a critical standpoint, of the impossibility of words to define objects. A pioneer of feminist critique applied to the visual arts, Nancy Spero revisited the writings of that great disrupter of discourse, Antonin Artaud. In the Catalan context, in a playful manner the poet Joan Brossa explored the alphabet’s performative capacity. You can see their works in the MACBA galleries.