exhibition
22 May 2019 > 08 September 2019
Al norte de la tormenta. From Robert Rauschenberg to Juan Muñoz
#AlNorteDeLaTormenta
photogallery
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Absorto, 1991
Wood, plaster, felt, copper, rubber
Since the early nineties, the Portuguese artist has favoured the use of industrial materials, cement, bricks, rubber tubes, copper, wood, old artefacts interspersed with neon lights, embracing in his language painting, sculpture, photography, and design. He has developed his work on issues such as space, architecture understood as the human act of building, memory, and time. The sculpture Absorto is an enigmatic circular construction in which a poetic and paradoxical mise en scene with suggestive power goes beyond the visual to reach a contemplative and spiritual dimension.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Lurra G 139, 1989/Oxido G 269, 1992
Lurra G 215, 1991/Lurra G 217, 1991
Terracotta
The relationship between light and architecture, the metamorphosis of space and the definition of volumes through form, measure and time were the primary investigations of Eduardo Chillida who always studied conceptual issues and metaphysical concerns in depth in his work with great simplicity, balance, and poetry. We find these elements of mystery, elegance, and organicity in the four terracotta sculptures in which the relationship that rises between the forms is elevated and, which, becomes stronger for the artist the more he works in secret, in silence. For the Basque artist, this relationship is an expressive space with a spiritual dimension comparable to breathing, inaccessible and hidden from the outside world.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Float, 1986
Plaster and wood
Attracted to discarded and found materials and at the same time actively interested in the creation of images and artefacts that do not exist in the natural or functional world but that manage to make us reflect on the process, the function and the metaphysical qualities of the objects created. Thanks to his studies at the Technical High School and subsequent experience at the laboratories of the National Rubber Producers Research Association, this English artist entered into contact with the world of atoms and biochemistry and developed an interest in the essence of matter and its transformations. Float is a pallet and typical glass container used in chemical laboratories transformed to obtain a new ambiguous and paradoxical sculptural form.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
100 years, 1997-2000
Black and white photographs, labels on grey cardboard
He has always been passionate about collecting images and archiving. In the work 100 years, develops over time a splendid series made up of 101 photographic portraits of human beings between the first months and a hundred years of life. People photographed in black and white, all accompanied by a label that identifies and reveals their age, are mainly friends, family members, and acquaintances of the German artist and are captured in a direct and disenchanted manner. Each posing subject becomes functional to the description of the unfolding of the chronology of human life by placing visitors in a meeting point of the present, past, and future in which to reflect on the passing of time and the ambiguity of everyday life.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Untitled, 1991
Cement fibre and iron
The boundaries between sculpture and architecture merge in Cristina Iglesisas’ works. Her works are often conceived as places that open to other spaces, creating images that are positioned between reality and fiction, presence and representation. The Untitled large mysterious sculpture makes the visitor perceive a sense of impenetrability and at the same time invites the viewer to enter the work in order to be transposed to a dreamlike world, full of unexpected events. Despite its imposing size and the use of heavy materials, the Basque artist does not at any time give up the idea of lightness and transparency, where each detail has the goal of stimulating sensations and emotions.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Series La Safor from the project Gandía i La Safor: els paisatges de Joanot Martorell, 1990
Photographs, silver jelly on paper
He concentrates on the documentation of life in the city and his photographs tend to make the social, economic and political tensions of contemporary society manifest. The Madrilenian artist is a pioneer of photography in peripheral spaces, in port and industrial areas. In this series La Safor, from the project Gandía i La Safor: els paisatges de Joanot Martorell his interest is aimed at the municipality of Gandía in the province of Valencia. The city is meticulously reproduced with a descrptive style capable of capturing the real landscape in all its details without any kind of romanticism. The places of La Safor are revealed in the different phases of construction of the buildings of the summer resorts, from the low houses of the locals placed on the seafront to the terraced houses, passing through the cinema and the deserted kiosks.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Escalera mecánica, 1987
Iron and paint
Ángeles Marco’s works go back to the post-minimalist, conceptual and constructivist tradition, focusing on topics such as the fall, the void, the abyss, and the lack of certainty. The work Escalera mecánica presents itself like a truncated iron staircase that rises towards nothing. In the sculptures and installations of the Valencian artist, there is a strong existential component and concepts such as imbalance, displacement, and vertigo insistently appear. The feeling of vertigo leads to the unknown, to the fear of the uncertain, and, at the same time, it becomes a metaphor of freedom, of the innumerable uncertainties in the face of which man has to make choices.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Collection of 60 drawings nº 7, ca.1988- 1990
Ink on conservation paper
The American artist is known for using mass production methods in his work in various ways. The idea of repetition, of “unique seriality” is the key to his work. His approach allowed him to analyse and critically assess the state of the art work, as opposed to the standardization of consumer objects in everyday life. In Collections of 60 drawings n° 7, sixty drawings of black abstract shapes on a white background, seem to be mass-produced but in fact they are unique pieces in which painting is reduced to a simple sign. The drawings differ from each other, only for small variations attracting the attention of the public to search for the differences. Allan McCollum provokes a state of confusion in the observer who cannot tell with certainty if he or she is looking at a work of art or something that represents it, analysing the qualities that make an object a work of art and underlining the difference between “the idea of the work and its status as a commodity.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Al norte de la tormenta, 1986
Iron
known mainly for his ability to create possible narratives, unreal worlds inhabited by curious characters, alienating environments in which a tension is created between illusion and reality. The title of the exhibition takes its name from this enigmatic and unusual work of the Madrilenian artist. The iron sculpture has a circular shape with various elements typical of his art at the beginning: scaffolding, balconies, portals, railings, corridors, knives and cuts, ambiguous structures that emerge from the surface unable to perform their real function. A configuration that looks like an astrolabe, a sundial that marks the time in which mystery, architecture, fragment and illusion mix to activate the imagination of the viewer.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Model for tunnels, 1981
Reinforced plaster, iron and wood
Bruce Nauman’s works try to create surprising spaces and forms, not immediately recognisable as such, capable of stimulating an alteration of the ways in which the individual perceives the world in which he or she usually lives.
Model for Tunnels simulates an empty tunnel, a structure that highlights the junctions between the various waste materials producing a certain confusion between inside and outside, beginning and end. The sculpture seems to float in an indeterminate space and suggests a state of indefiniteness aimed at showing the process rather than the finished work.
Model for Tunnels was the center of Nauman’s artistic activity in the Seventies and early Eighties, becoming real instruments used for investigating the relationship between ideas and their material formalisation.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
El cuerpo y la ciudad de refractario II (1/2), 2003 El cuerpo y la ciudad de refractario III (1/2), 2003 Ciudad con figura A, 2003
C-print
Dedicated many years of work in creating an imaginary urbanism made of spatial and constructive configurations as organic structures. The Valencian artist created his first large sculptural installation, Ciudad, City, in 1974, which is made up of a set of geometric and repetitive shapes gathered in a composition that reproduces an urban landscape. The three photographs El cuerpo y la ciudad de refractario II and III(1/2), Ciudad with figure A mix earthenware modules, iron sculptures, phallic symbols and totems. His representation without veils in photographs enhances the relevant symbiotic relationship between architecture and the human body, which is central to his work.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Ostinato Blanco/Azul, 1996
Metal (copper, iron), glass and electrical cables
Known internationally in the field of electronic and sound art thanks to his installations, that link music and plastic arts. The artist creates sculptures that combine music, lights, and electronic circuits and stand out for their sensorial and conceptual nature. Also in this case the great and suggestive sound sculpture Ostinato Blanco/Azul comes to life with the passage of the audience and activates a relationship with space and creates effects that are surprising to the spectators.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Blood Orange Summer Glut, 1987
Assemblage (assembled metal parts and toy trucks)
In the Eighties, Robert Rauschenberg’s art was aimed at exploring the visual properties of metal. The Gluts are sculptures created by the assembly of found objects that the artist started in 1986 and on which he continued to work without interruption until 1995. All these finds – road signs, exhaust pipes, radiators, shutters and much more – put together become poetic and playful works that acquire a new meaning.
Blood Orange Summer Glut shows the great inventiveness of the American artist who thought of his own Gluts like souvenirs without nostalgia, opportunities for reflection for people in front of the ruins.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Sweets, 1991
Iron, lead, and glass
An artist known mainly for her impressive, abstract sculptures and the possible symbolic meanings in which she investigates the relationship between space and materials. Iron nets, metal mesh, and rigid and suspended structures are often used in her work. In Sweets she uses iron, lead and glass. The ironic and enigmatic sculpture stands before the spectators like a big box with candies, objects of memory in which physical and mental unite. In the aspect of a simple language, of forms that are close to us, the Spanish sculptress manages to carry us far away, to undefined and emotionally evocative situations.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto di allestimento © Eleonora Colizzi
Gran diptic roig i negre, 1980
Mixed media on canvas
In 1981, the year following the creation of the canvas Gran diptic roig i negre, Antoni Tàpies received the Fine Arts gold medal from King Juan Carlos I and an honorary degree from the Royal College of Art in London. The extraordinary ability of the Spanish artist to be on a par with an “alchemist” who succeeds in transforming matter, projecting into his works a psychic substance capable of raising universal archetypal memories, has always been appreciated. The graphic textures, the matter, the mathematical symbols present in this canvas seem to spring from an explosive big bang full of subtended forces ready to take shape, a space irreducible to logic.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Roller en la plaza del MACBA, Barcelona, 1998 Surferos en una antigua mejillonera, 1995 En la playa de Carcavelos, Lisboa, 1997 Breaker en el half pipe de Samil, Vigo, 2003 Windsurfero en la playa urbana, Tánger, 1999 En la playa de Mi Cayito, La Habana, 2001 Exhibición de boxeo en la sala Apolo, Barcelona, 1995 En Festimad. Móstoles, Madrid, 1998 Jugador de kayak-polo tras un partido en el puerto, Málaga, 1997 En el patio del Instituto Manuel Azaña, Getafe (Madrid), 1993 Jose, Dj de rap. Almería, 1991 Fan de Bad Religion, Jerez de la Frontera, 1996 Rapero de Sindicato del Crimen en el Terreno. Madrid, 1989 En el Cementerio del Sur. Manila, 2002 En la playa de Huntington. Los Angeles, 2013 Junto al Skate Park, 2008 En la feria de agosto. Olivenza (Badajoz), 1999 Skater, 1996
Coloured photograph on paper
A great lover of music, since the Seventies, Miguel Trillo has devoted himself to photography in musical environments; at first, he focused his attention on stages and groups until his interest moved to the audience of those same festivals, bars, concerts, coming to be considered in the Eighties the photographer of the movida madrileña.
A storm of vitality is released by these portraits full of personality of the artist known for his dedication to youth culture and street fashion.
In this case, eighteen young adolescents are immortalised with an anthropological attitude on the streets of Lisbon, Barcelona, Malaga, Almeria, Los Angeles, Tangier and Manila.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
There’s no reason a good man is hard to find I, 1988
Mixed media, PVC tube, metal nuts and bolts, large gauge wire, coloured tissue paper, acrylic, faux leather, industrial thread and wood.
A post-minimalist artist who escapes any kind of categorization. He uses a great variety of media in his work, such as sculpture, drawing, painting, engraving, collage, and installation. The use of poor, ephemeral materials and the search for different lines, volumes, shapes, colours, and scales are elements that belong to the American artist’s vocabulary, known for its poetic dimension and its attention to the audience’s aesthetic experience. A sense of wonder, to which a certain irony is added, captures the viewer in front of the sculpture There’s no reason a good man is hard to find I, which rises like a spiral from the ground upwards and seems to echo to Tuttle’s words that “society must find a way to go from pain to joy”.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Solitària II. Sèrie: El melic del món. Fotografies #11, 1990-1991, photography
Pits I-IV. Sèrie: El melic del món. Fotografies #1, 1995, C-Print on wood
The works of Eulalia Valldosera appear as simple and sophisticated at the same time.
In these two photographs, which are part of the series El melic del món / The navel of the world, countless cigarette butts are minutely positioned by the artist to recreate an intimate place, a body, a cosmogony, in search of a point of origin. The viewer is invited to get lost in the smoke of this dark landscape in which he seems to find himself catapulted into a place where fantasy is released and time expands, leaving room for an inner journey. Through the use of everyday objects animated by light effects, shadows, refractions, and a strong relationship with the dark energies of matter, the Spanish artist seems to offer us an experience of listening to invisible segments of memory.
Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Gallery 4
curated by Hou Hanru with Chiara Bertini
The masterpieces of the IVAM collection at MAXXI
This exhibition is a part of Expanding The Horizon, the programme dedicated to the development of international partnerships between the museum, other cultural institutions and private collections.
On this occasion MAXXI is hosting a number of works from the collection of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, one of the most important modern art museums in Spain, which houses masterpieces of Spanish and international art.
The exhibition takes its title from a 1986 work by the famous Spanish artist Juan Muñoz, Al norte de la tormenta. Also featured are works by, among others, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg,Tony Cragg, Antoni Tàpies, Cristina Iglesias, Susana Solano and Ángeles Marco.
2020 will see works from the MAXXI collection exhibited in the IVAM spaces.
Juan Muñoz, Al norte de la tormenta, 1986. Courtesy IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
IVAM COLLECTION ON DISPLAY
Pedro Cabrita Reis
Eduardo Chillida
Tony Cragg
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Cristina Iglesias
Manolo Laguillo
Ángeles Marco
Allan McCollum
Juan Muñoz
Bruce Nauman
Miquel Navarro
José Antonio Orts
Robert Rauschenberg
Susana Solano
Antoni Tàpies
Miguel Trillo
Richard Tuttle
Eulalia Valldosera