Exhibition
Del 5 de octubre de 2018 al 1 de noviembre de 2022

A Short Century: MACBA Collection

finished

Curated by the MACBA curatorial team, A Short Century: MACBA Collection features a permanent display of works from the MACBA Collection that is regularly updated. The exhibition takes a chronological route from 1929 to the present day, emphasising the particular points of focus that the Collection has developed since its inception; a story told from the perspective of Barcelona and its immediate context. In 1929, Barcelona hosted the Universal Exposition, with the German Pavilion (aka the Barcelona Pavilion) designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. 1929 also saw the founding of the GATCPAC (Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture), promoted by Josep Lluís Sert and Josep Torres i Clavé. In Paris, André Breton wrote the Second Surrealist Manifesto and a group of abstract artists led by Joaquín Torres-García and Michel Seuphor founded Cercle et Carré. The same year, Virginia Woolf published her feminist essay A Room of One’s Own and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York.

Over the course of these nine decades, the experience of art has constantly changed, as is made clear by this exhibition. Following some of the most significant moments in this journey, the different sections highlight the uniqueness of the MACBA Collection. From the transformation of Barcelona in the 1930s and its commitment to modernity, to the involvement of art in the Spanish Civil War, with Bauhaus artists such as Anni Albers, who visited the city, and also Alexander Calder, Le Corbusier, Joaquín Torres-García and Alberto.

The first attempts to rekindle the spirit of culture in the post-war years and the international explosion of the social and political revolutions of the 1960s are featured, with artists such as Erró, Richard Hamilton, Herminio Molero, Ronald Nameth, Claes Oldenburg and Evru/Zush. The peace, feminist and hippie movements together with other manifestations of social revolution had their artistic expression in pop, psychedelia and acid pop, all of which are widely represented in the exhibition.

		
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dates

Del 5 de octubre de 2018 al 1 de noviembre de 2022

location

Meier building

title

A Short Century: MACBA Collection

documentation

Bibliography on ‘MACBA Collection’

dates

Del 5 de octubre de 2018 al 1 de noviembre de 2022

title

A Short Century: MACBA Collection

location

Meier building

documentation

Bibliography on ‘MACBA Collection’

curated by

Tanya Barson

see detail

Playlist of the Psychedelia and Pop room See catalogue

Virtual tour

more information

In the virtual tour of the Collection display, you will go through the different areas and works on display, but you will also hear the voices of the people in the museum who have looked after them, explore unusual perspectives and travel routes that would never have occurred to you. Start your journey, full of curiosities and unreleased content that is sure to leave you impressed.

ROOMS

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed a break with established art forms and a profound transformation in the field of aesthetic reflection. The idea of an artistic avant-garde, and the value placed on originality, led to a radical experimentation with materials and form. Among the main trends of the avant-garde were those that tried to construct universal and utopian artistic languages using an analytical approach to form. Taking place against this background of tension between the traditional and the radical, the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona led to very important transformations in the city’s urban infrastructure, projecting it internationally as a tourist capital. Here was a response to the desire to connect with new technical developments and the artistic and architectural languages of the international avant-garde, at a time when the country was experiencing a profound pedagogical renewal that promoted secular and rational education as an important key to social progress and modernity.

Virtual tour

The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was also a war of images in which artists and filmmakers were involved in the diffusion of the different political ideologies at stake through their corresponding aesthetic means. In the territory loyal to the Government of the Republic, poster design underwent a special development in which the advanced visual and typographic languages of the international avant-garde were used to communicate messages clearly to a mass audience. In cinema, the contribution made by the anarchist movement through the Unified Trade Union of Public Entertainment of the CNT (a confederation of anarchist labour unions), with the production of films addressing subjects including the collectivising revolution in agriculture as well as the role of the militias, was fundamental to the anti-Fascist resistance. The involvement of artists in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris International Exposition reveals the use of art for the internationalisation of the conflict and to generate support.

Virtual tour

In the years after the Civil War and following the end of the Second World War, artists explored divergent forms of abstraction. While this has been articulated as a tension between abstract geometric and concrete art on the one hand, and an abstraction that explored matter and an informel aesthetic on the other, these two principal tendencies also had degrees of proximity. Even though later forms of concrete art continued in the tradition of earlier utopian abstraction advanced by an international avant-garde, nevertheless elements of organicism, biomorphism and gesture began to be used. Similarly instances of geometric form can be detected in the more material abstraction. While associated with a resurgent bourgeoisie, as well as a counter to it, both tendencies were a means to deal with the creation of art in the aftermath of so much war and violence. They can be seen not necessarily as a way to avoid the consequences of conflict, but instead as techniques to examine, even if indirectly, the nature of humanity.

Virtual tour

The social and political revolutions that occurred internationally in the 1960s triggered a growing opposition to the establishment that led to the anti-war, feminist, hippie, environmentalist and other social movements that proclaimed new and revolutionary lifestyles. These changes pursued freedoms – including sexual liberation that would challenge the traditional family-centred morality –, confrontation with the status quo and the rebellious student movement. In 1969, Theodore Roszak defined the term and values of the ‘counterculture’ in his book The Making of a Counter Culture. The precedent for this revolution, decisive to the later appearance of the hippie movement, was the beat generation to which the writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs belonged. The counterculture gave rise to two interrelated artistic currents: Pop art and psychedelia. However, while Pop art expressed enthusiasm for the present and celebrated everyday life and the culture of the spectacle, psychedelia rejected reality, looking beyond it through a modified or heightened perception.

Virtual tour

This room examines the sixties and seventies through the language of Minimalism, and yet it also seeks to problematise our understanding of this movement. Reacting against gestural abstraction, Minimalism sought to present a pure form of abstract art, indebted to early twentieth-century Constructivism. It was characterised by a highly simplified or economic use of geometry and a close relation to industrial, serialised production. Supposedly, it was also absent of content beyond its purely formal qualities. Even while being involved in or influenced by Minimalism, however, some artists used this aesthetic to critique its neutrality and reinvest form with political and social content. While examples of classic works of Minimalist art are included here, the works selected also aim to show the boundaries where Minimalist art can be seen to blend with forms of feminist, performance, Conceptual and process art. This presents a more complex picture of the ways that different aesthetic priorities and competing interests interacted at the time, which counters a canonical or rigid reading of Minimalist art.

Virtual tour

The late sixties and seventies witnessed the emergence of a new era of radical feminism and feminist activism, within a broader counter-cultural or anti-establishment context, which took different forms around the world. This feminist struggle was at the basis of the work of a number of women artists, or even within a given social context. Many used the objectification of women in traditional forms of art and in the mass media, the creation of highly commercialised female stereotypes that emerged from advertising and publicity, as a means to denounce the subordinate role of women in society. Similarly, the body (through sexuality, motherhood and physical attractiveness), space (such as the domestic sphere), language, objects or attributes and colours associated with femininity or gendered as feminine were employed in ways that, with deliberate irony, embraced their formerly pejorative connotations in order to deconstruct and undermine such associations. Some artists widened their critique to counter a broader gender stereotyping. De modo similar, a menudo utilizaron el cuerpo (a través de la sexualidad, la maternidad y el atractivo físico), el espacio (como el ámbito doméstico), el lenguaje, los objetos, atributos y colores asociados con la feminidad o considerados «femeninos» exacerbando sus connotaciones peyorativas, un recurso deliberadamente irónico para deconstruir y dinamitar esas asociaciones. Algunas artistas fueron más lejos y criticaron estereotipos de género más amplios.

Virtual tour

Art and activism gained a new proximity in the eighties, and artists created work with strong ties to the domain of the street or elsewhere beyond the studio, bearing a relation to forms such as graffiti, comics or unauthorised fly-posters. Developing with the ongoing emergence of feminism, anti-racism, gay rights and identity politics were forms of art and activism that addressed specific issues such as the AIDS crisis. A burgeoning context of neoliberalism, free market economic policies and neo-colonial interventions were also targets for activist art. Popular culture and the cult of celebrity also exerted a continuing fascination for artists, who were impacted by the creation of new forms such as the music video and MTV, as well as fanzines produced as informal means of expression for subcultures, which provided a means to bypass establishment culture. Art, as well as fashion and graphic design, became dominated by intense new synthetic, heightened and fluorescent colours.

Virtual tour

The legacy of experimental artistic practices begun in the 1960s and 1970s was sustained throughout the 1980s and 1990s. During the euphoric years of the new democracy, and in parallel to a return to painting, concept art entered into large cultural institutions and the new museums created during those years. The artists revised the very notion of art and returned to the “poor” object, transforming it into a vehicle for aesthetic and metaphysical reflection: the idea of the double, reflection, time and the components of artistic presentation.

Virtual tour

In the 1980s and 1990s, social and political engagement continued to be present in many artistic practices. The denouncement of all forms of violence, war and the collapse of dialogue, as well as forms of social abuse carried out worldwide, centred the interest of many artists whose careers were already consolidated. In this mode of working, Francesc Torres used media images and objects from the consumption society to deactivate ideological codes that are not always explicit. Working from an artistic position, the artist encouraged collective thought of an effectively critical character, evidencing irrefutable parallelisms, as in his Siegesallee o Avinguda de la Victòria [Siegesallee, or Victory Avenue], or when intervening in the pages of well-known magazines like the historical Newsweek.

Virtual tour

Along with one’s own body as material for experimentation, interaction with nature is another of the components articulating the projects of Francesc Abad. His is a broadly understood notion of nature, related to ideas of culture, civilization, barbarism and the past and present of Europe. Presented in Metrònom in 1989, Europa arqueologia de rescat is an installation that calls on all these considerations. As with other projects by the artist, the fragility of memory, the presence of the document and art understood as a form of collective knowledge are present at the heart of the proposal. In this case, the work sets off from Abad’s discovery of a forest cave in the Serra de l’Obac mountains near Terrassa, his hometown. The cave, which had been inhabited by humans, leads the artist to invent a possible alphabet of signs that refers to the origin of writing, along with vertical stones which evoke the earliest indications of solstices and other measurements of time, apart from their clearly sexual referents. A journey to a primeval era linking alphabets, calendars, magic ritual and sexuality.

Virtual tour