The La Caixa Foundation has cleaned the dust from its contemporary art collection, which was started in 1985, to show at CaixaForum in Barcelona the revitalization the painting experienced in the 1980s from the hand of artists such as Miquel Barceló and Ferran García Sevilla.
The exhibition “Figurations” comprises 12 large works of art, owned by the private entity, many of which had never before been seen in Barcelona or only in the exhibition “26 Painters, 13 Critics: Panorama of Young Spanish Painting” that was organized in 1982. For “Figurations”, which will remain on view through September 27, the most expressionist was selected, and not only from Spanish artists: Anselm Kiefer, with his Dionysius the Aeropagite – Hierarchy of Angels (1984-1986) Italian Enzo Cucchi, with a remembrance of Arthur Rimbaud in exile, and American Julian Schnabel, with The Quixote Meets Corleone (1983), are some of them.
“Now we remember that moment in which painting returned to the figurative after years of being minimalist and conceptual”, a change precisely made to “renovate its own abstraction”, indicated the head of the La Caixa Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Nimfa Bisbe.
There is also a painting by Georg Baselitz, Black Mother with Black Child (1985), heavily influenced by his own personal collection of African art and that in this exhibition welcomes visitors into a hall in which the common denominator is the primitive: A. R. Penck dedicates a triptych to Jean-Michel Basquiat, with great influence from the graffiti he saw in New York, and a Miquel Barceló that was just starting to take off with influences from Picasso and the German neo-savages from that time.
Other artists represented in the exhibition are: José Manuel Broto, Miguel Ángel Campano, Rafael Zabaleta, Ferran García Sevilla, Xavier Grau, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and José María Sicilia.
The Contemporary Art Collection of “la Caixa” Foundation got underway in 1985 with the aim of bringing together a collection of works capable of reflecting the richness and complexity of artistic creation in our time. It currently offers a broad vision of art created from 1980 up to the present, with holdings of more than eight hundred key works by Spanish and foreign artists, featuring creations by fully established artists as well as pieces by young talents who are charting a new course in today’s art world.
This collection is represented in a permanent exhibition space at CaixaForum, the former Art Nouveau textile factory that “la Caixa” Foundation revamped into a cultural centre a few years ago in Barcelona. Beyond a doubt, the exhibition of the collection is an essential contribution to the Spanish artistic milieu. And it is for this reason that “la Caixa” Foundation is receptive to its being displayed, with different selections, at the country’s leading venues. These exhibitions, which offer different visions and interpretations of modern art, seek to open up new ways of looking at artistic creation while introducing contemporary art to larger segments of the general public.
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Image:A. R. Penck dedicates a triptych to Jean-Michel Basquiat, with great influence from the graffiti he saw in New York. Photo: EFE/Alberto Estévez.
