Open doors

After the completion of the museum building and before launching the museum’s activities in earnest, it was considered a good idea to hold a number of open days so that the general public in Barcelona could get to know the building first hand. From 30 April to 1 May 1995, eighteen works of art belonging to the various holdings of the Consortium were exhibited in the museum’s spaces. There was no curatorial intention beyond that of presenting the building’s exhibition spaces.

Carlos Pazos is an artist who reveals the failure of modernity and questions the systems of representation: the image can no longer evoke reality and the self belongs to fiction. The artist, hiding behind a variety of masks, uses souvenirs and objects, and turns the art of collecting into one of the main themes in his work. With a kitsch aesthetic, he combines the poetics of the object with irony and the narcissistic mask.

Sergi Aguilar participated in the Open Day with his work Central (1986). This artist is part of a generation of sculptors whose artistic careers first came to light during Spain’s transition to democracy. It is an eclectic and diverse group that, in a sense, took over from the Informalism of the post-war years by way of the lessons of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Along with Aguilar, it includes artists such as Cristina Iglesias, Francisco Leiro, Miquel Navarro, Adolfo Schlosser and Susana Solano, all of whom subverted the limits of sculpture-as-monument and endowed space with a new performative quality that encourages spectator interaction.

Jorge Oteiza (Orio, 1908 – San Sebastian, 2003) is one of the most important Basque artists of the twentieth century. Self-taught, he began working in the 1920s, influenced by the avant-garde movements of the time such as Cubism and Primitivism. Keen to investigate pre-Colombian sculpture, he travelled to South America in 1934, where he remained until 1948. On his return to Spain, Oteiza won a competition for the sculptures of the Basilica of Our Lady of Arantzazu, in Oñate, Gipuzkoa. It proved a controversial project in which he tested his theories on the decline of figurative expression. It was subsequently banned by the Church and not completed until 1968.

In Ángel Ferrant’s constant search to renovate the sculptural language, from the end of the fifties until his death he worked on a new concept of changing forms that he called ‘infinite sculpture’. These works are made up of mobile pieces that can be fitted together in various ways, as in the Sèrie Venècia (Venice Series). 

Untitled, 1972 is an unusual, subtle and poetic work in which the drawing with string on glass held in place with lead contains the seed of his later works on the Fibonacci sequence and the spiral, while the table form looks forward to the large installations of tables covered with an abundance of natural elements.
Leonardo Fibonacci’s numerical series, created by using the sum of two consecutive numbers to produce the next number (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…), finds its material expression in the form of the spiral, which simultaneously suggests both spatial and temporal expansion.
This series formally represents the biological growth of natural organisms, thus bringing together two of the artist’s chief interests: mathematics and nature. Thought has no images, the idea of those numbers is a wish for the non-image, and yet they end up being images, an image of thought and not an image in itself.

A member of the Beat Generation, in the 1950s Rauschenberg became interested in collage and assemblage, which he discovered together with Cy Twombly and guided by an interest in Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. After experimenting with their many possibilities, in the seventies, he began to incorporate simple materials such as cardboard, packing tape and rubber. With its deliberately ‘poor’ appearance, his work Untitled escapes any formal rhetoric. The technical procedure of assemblage not only serves to put different materials in dialogue but also proposes a visual vindication of the objects.

‘On the one hand the canvas, on the other the mirror, me in the middle. One eye looking at the canvas, the other at the mirror. Staring at the two objects intensely they gradually become superimposed. My mirror image transfers itself to the canvas while remaining in the mirror and the canvas transfers itself to the mirror, becoming one and the same thing.
Inside the mirror, there I am, there we are. Where, when?
We are inside the mirror when we are here and when we are there.
I can see myself, or perhaps I can’t see myself, while you can see me in the mirror. But it’s not just us or whoever is in front of it now, he who is distant is also in the mirror. Indeed we are in the mirror even when it’s not in front of us […].’ 
Michelangelo Pistoletto