Recopilación (Collection), from the Serie Paisajes (Landscapes Series), 1977
Oil and terracotta on canvas
85 x 118 cm
Carmen CALVO (València, 1950)
Recopilación (Collection), from the Serie Paisajes (Landscapes Series), 1977, is associated with the image of the order of accumulation linked to the work of Carmen Calvo since she began to stand out as an artist by the 1970s of the last century. A painter of concepts, as she has often defined herself, Calvo resorted to clay when beginning her career as a pictorial material to confront traditional painting, the then academic discipline par excellence, but opposing, in turn, to the decorative use of clay, thereby shifting both: she used clay as if it were paint, ennobling it automatically.
The discovery of the collections of Egyptian and Mesopotamic art at the Louvre Museum in Paris influenced the desire to collect or to repeat that can be perceived in her works from the end of the 1970s in which, following Valeriano Bozal, small pieces of terracotta on canvas or wooden boards, recreate the image of a landscape or introduce us to a rhythm of sequences. These small pieces that are grouped or disintegrated compose a basic structure and a principle which is maintained in its entirety today, although the changes are substantial. The fundamental transformation concerns the replacement of the small clay pieces by concrete objects, fragments, or the remains of diverse materials that make up the imaginary of her work.
IVAM has twenty-nine works by Carmen Calvo in its collection. Los cielos están cosidos, dating from 2019, is the latest work to have been integrated into the collection, and also the origin of her recent intervention in the façade.
