Catalan Conceptual Artists in the MACBA Collection

Jordi Benito’s radical Actionism, as well as his active participation, together with a whole generation of artists, in the development of Conceptual practices in Catalonia throughout the 1970s, secured his standing as one of the most significant representatives of this movement in Spain. Benito’s early practice consisted of simple actions in which the body was used as a pretext to construct a language related to the environment, to occupy and vacate the space, to measure the body or its impact when colliding against a static and hard volume. Here he tested the physical resistance of the body, pushing it to the limit and learning to control it.

The recovery of the memory and places of our emotional and political biographies, the critical and utopian potential of art, and the fragility of human beings, images and words are some of the concepts that underlie Francesc Abad’s work. He swapped his brushes for still cameras and Portapacks and threw himself into making a kind of art that valued the creative process over and above the object.

Her practice reconfigures the concept of the artistic, within the multiplicity of attitudes that blur what traditional historiography had encompassed under the heading of Conceptual art. The history of art has ascribed Miralles’ production to the Conceptual, Land art or even feminism, without attending to the breadth and complexity of her ideas, which challenge the limits of those labels.

What kind of image of a man and a woman would be gained by an alien that had never met any living human being and only knew them through the images that appear in the media? This question forms the premise for the film made by Eugènia Balcells the following year: Boy meets girl, with its strong gender-based content.

Regarded as one of the most significant Conceptual artists in Catalonia, Àngels Ribé initiated her production in the late sixties with actions, installations and performances centred round the body and space.

It is almost impossible to dissociate Pazos the artist from Pazos the collector of objects. His works are rich, self-referential microcosms that deconstruct notions of authorship, originality, culture, artwork and collecting.

Although he originally studied law, economics and sociology, Benet Rossell soon took an interest in artistic activity and began to work in an array of disciplines, from drawing and signic writing, painting, and the occasional tapestry or ceramic piece, to action and performance, experimental and commercial film, poetry and theatre, among others. His approach to all these languages is highly personal, and his unconventional output includes optical objects, work with crops, drawings and interventions on film, dibuixos amanits (oiled drawings), affidavits, wordless comic strips, film scripts and dibutexts (drawing-texts), to name a few.