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Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario

432 rested of an open space but suspended. Or that duel that descends by the work of Boltanski as a ritual of the memory of disappearance, mourned by Zoran Music or Carmen Calvo. Or from the play writing of Bernardí Roig or John Davies, or in the images of Markus Lüpertz or Georg Baselitz or from the solitude of the photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher... all of them sometimes dragged to the closure of Madgalena Abakanowicz’s proposal. The deformed gestures of Bruce Nauman or virtual space of a permanent happening of the work of Muntadas returns to give us as the true measure of the world... Or that other that Sean Scully imagines as a wall of light, always ready for the enlightenment that art can offer us. It would not be just to make no reference to the exceptional photographic collection that the IVAM has gathered over the course of these years, undoubtedly the most important of the Spanish collections, and that accompanies the exhibition of XXV Anniversary as a permanent continuum. In its sequence they are fixing the moments in which the view of the spectator of art of the XXth century has been formed, a long journey that we can again travel though thanks to the Collection of the IVAM. CATALOGUE 1 The work of Julio González is one of the central themes of the collections of the IVAM and in some way represents the esprit of the historical Avant-gardes in this museum that bears his name. His Danseuse à Marguerite of 1937 and his Homme cactus I of 1939 represent two important moments that guide this exhibition. Heir of frenetic decades of formal experimentation, the language of Julio González reoriented the work of sculpture based on a recovery of industrial materials such as iron, to which he insufflates a poetic intent in which movement and gesture are articulated happily bursting into space from its own lightness. In this first room one seeks a dialogue concerning his work from close references, which are ranging from pieces of Joaquín Torres-García to David Smith, going through Brancusi’s photographic perspective , until reaching the notebook of the travels of Matisse to Tahiti, or his always close friendship with Picasso. Saving the distance of years, they all vibrate the same intention and search that orients the work of art. 2 The years that preceded the Great War were a time full with tensions and ruptures. The so-called crisis of the fin-de-siècle resulted at the end of the first decade toward significant changes both in the ways of thinking, as well as in art. The two first manifestations of a change in the artistic culture were German Expressionism on one side and Italian Futurism on the other. Renunciation of the principles of naturalism and a mimetic art led Expressionism to start a journey into the interior of the subject. Futurism was more driven to imagine the future, when the proximity of the Great War was not yet thinkable. Everything becomes frantic and speed is the condition of modern life, as Marinetti will write in ‘Les mots in liberté futuristes’. Carlo Carrà will associate the plastic dynamism with the political futurism favouring the ambiguity of some ideas that will be establish in the political agenda of the 20s. In parallel the same search is occurring in other projects attentive to encrypt the changes of the era and its consequences. Robert and Sonia Delaunay, along with Vicente Huidobro or Blaise Cendrars, explore a new spatialism. While from the other shore, in which pessimism has been permanently installed, an ironic grin builds the speech of disappointment. There was Dadaism with its multi-faceted geography, planting suspicions at the end of the era. Tristan Tzara, in his ‘Dada soulève tout’, and Francis Picabia, El Lissitzky and Jean Arp, like the work of Kurt Schwitters will be a sign of a journey that has definitively reversed the world of representation and meaning as had already been suggested by Marcel Duchamp with La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. 3 The end of the Great War opened a period of experimentation in two directions. The first was more attentive to imagine and build a new society and culture after the catastrophe of war. Germany was defeated; therefore the Republic of Weimar emerged as a hope that soon will fail by opening a time of dramatic questions. In this context there is a search of form and space that runs through all fields of the arts and the applied arts. At the crossroads of this search, the draft of the Bauhaus of Walter Gropius had an exemplary significance. It would suffice to view the manifests and teaching notes of some of them, such as Klee, Kandinsky, Albers and Moholy-Nagy, to be able to identify the philosophy of a new culture of this project. The second of which runs through the territory which had already been explored before by Dada and that soon will acquire new rights in its alliance with Surrealism. Equally, but from different premises we can see how the previous concepts of the futurism moved now to the Rotoreliefs of Marcel Duchamp or to the experiments of Antoine Pevsner or Naum Gabo, ready to mix industrial materials in their construction. We can observe the same in Quinze variations sur un même thème of Max Bill or in Equilibre of Jean Helion. We cannot forget the space exploration of Alexander Calder, which resolved by advanced and provisional balances, which suggest the illusion of new worlds. 4 During the 1920s the trends outlined above are polarized. The political scene of the decade creates increasingly complex situation and the arts become performers of the same. On one hand, a certain search for order is found in the culture of the project and its architecture in the main lab – Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier or the same Mies van der Rohe - with his writings in defence of an International Architektur that will later bring the so-called Modern Movement, whose programmatic premises will appear in the journal Die Form. On the other hand, the appearance in 1924 of La Révolution Surréaliste by the hand of Andre Breton, opens


Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
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