New abstract paintings

This exhibition consisted of over forty large-scale works by twenty-nine international painters from countries such as Germany, the United States, Denmark, England and Spain. Most of these artists had started working in the late sixties, when painting was beginning to be considered an obsolete practice following its rapid evolution from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism.
Although they shared an interest in abstraction, these artists did not form part of any homogenous movement. Instead, they drew on a diverse range of strategies that challenged the formal dogmatisms and univocal visions of representations and of things. Ambiguity, complexity and the notion of impurity prevailed in their works, separating them from discursive models in which abstraction was inseparably bound to purity and the ideal.

The focus on abstraction in this exhibition was not meant to imply that all paintings should be abstract or that all art should be painting, but to demonstrate that abstraction could once again claim an important position in the aesthetic debate.

The exhibition included works by Domenico Bianchi, José Manuel Broto, Ian Davenport, Stephen Ellis, Günther Förg, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Luis Gordillo, Xavier Grau, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, Fiona Rae, David Reed and Gerhard Richter, among others.