ART AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
24 JUNE, 201731 JANUARY, 2018 GALLERY 1 Curator: Benjamin Weil
Fundación Botín acquired the majority of the artworks on display in this exhibition in the early years of the present century. The show affords visitors an overview of the work undertaken by Fundación Botín in the realm of the visual arts in the last twenty-five years or so. This selection includes artworks by recognised contemporary masters who have taught at the Santander Visual Arts Workshop at Villa Iris over the last twenty years, as well as pieces by a number of artists who have benefited from the programme of Visual Arts Scholarships which the foundation has been running since 1993, and who have since gone on to greater things. And so, works by artists of the stature of Miroslaw Balka, Tacita Dean, Carlos Garaicoa, Mona Hatoum, Antoni Muntadas and Juan Uslé are on display on the first floor exhibition hall alongside works by Lara Almarcegui, Carlos Bunga, Sandra Gamarra, Renata Lucas, Wilfredo Prieto and Fernando Sánchez Castillo, among others.
Carlos Bunga. Attempt to preserve, 2014
The overall set of works on show is highly diverse, both in terms of supports and media: photography, installation, sculpture, video, drawing and so on, as well as in the diversity of their conceptual focus. The selection wishes to provide a perspective on the current state of artistic practice, both in terms of its form and content; to reflect upon how classic art forms have evolved, how new narratives have been unfolding, and how contemporary artists address a cultural context that is informed by both local and global circumstances.
All the selected works ponder the complexity of a world characterized by large mutations, social instability, conflicts and tensions of all kinds, as well as the acceleration of time. This affects the way one may perceive a reality that tends to be increasingly fragmented, as fact and fiction mingle in an ever more intricate fashion. Art and the exhibition space remain as one of the few bastions of slowed-down time, one made for observation and contemplation, which, in turn, fosters critical thinking and comprehension.
KEYS TO EXPLORING THE EXHIBITION
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1. JUAN USLÉ I Dreamt that you Revealed. The Guest, 2004
3. MONA HATOUM Still-Life, 2009
“Soñé que revelabas” is a series of paintings Juan Uslé has been working on for over two decades. He usually paints them during the night, in silence, listening to his own heart and applying a brushstroke at each beat. The painting thus becomes a trace and proof of this essential vitality, and also a kind of clock that marks the passing of time, while also calling to mind a musical score.
Lying on a table, we see a set of colourful, beautifully crafted and incredibly tactile ceramic pieces. On closer examination, we realise that they are actually casts of hand grenades, instruments of destruction and mutilation. This work is quite typical of the way Mona Hatoum formally employs the language of Minimal art to reflect upon the inner or hidden violence in contemporary society.
2. CARLOS GARAICOA The Word Transformed (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII y VIII), 2009
4. LARA ALMARCEGUI Wastelands of Amsterdam, 1998-99
Carlos Garaicoa explores the way architecture and propaganda are intertwined in Cuba, a country where the ruins of a former capitalist order are metaphorically augmented by the promise of a better future, per the ubiquitous government’s indoctrination campaigns. Confronting the limits of a utopia, he also reflects in more general terms upon the city, its decay and its constant evolution.
Lara Almarcegui examines processes of urban transformation brought on by political, social, and economic change, focusing her attention on features that are usually overlooked: wastelands, construction materials, invisible elements. She photographs the sites, and collects historical, geographic, ecological, and sociological data about those vacant areas, before they get to be transformed into new developments. This early work was made in Amsterdam, where the artist is based.
EXHIBITIONS
OPENING HOURS Winter (October - May) Tuesday - Sunday 10:00 am - 8:00 pm
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ADMISSION General admission: €8 Concession: (ID required) €4 Over 65s, students from 16 to 25, handiccaped and large families.
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Free entry (ID required): Friends of Centro Botín, Permanent Pass holders, children under 16, unemployed, sponsors, accredited journalists and members of the International Council of Museums – ICOM– and the IAC. Groups: €6 per person Minimum 8, maximum 30 people –guide/organiser included-.
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ART AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
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centrobotin.org Cover images: Julie Mehretu, detail of Zero Canyon (a dissimulation), 2006. Ink and Acrylic on Canvas. 304.8 x 213.4 cm. Image: Collection MUSAC, courtesy MUSAC. Tacita Dean, The Wet Prayer, 2013. Chalk on slate panels. Diptych, 244 x 244 cm each.
JULIE MEHRETU:
A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
12 OCTOBER, 201725 FEBRUARY, 2018 GALLERIES 1 AND 2 Curators: Vicente Todolí Suzanne Cotter
Organized in collaboration with Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), Centro Botín presents Julie Mehretu. A universal history of everything and nothing, the most important survey to be presented in Europe by this artist, widely considered as one of the foremost painters of her generation. The exhibition features a selection of 30 paintings and 60 drawings from key moments in Mehretu´s practice, ranging from her early graphite drawings and her ink and acrylic paintings, to majestic large-scale canvases whose worked surfaces and complex architectures constructed via ink, paint, erasure, line and gesture, take on increasing depth and solidity over time.
Detail of Conjured Parts (Syria), Aleppo and Damascus, 2016. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 152.4 x 305.4 cm Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
Mehretu´s works from recent years highlight, in their monumental scale, the artist´s emphasis on calligraphic mark making and the painterly. The exhibition also lends weight to the importance of drawing in the artist’s practice, in its parallel as well as symbiotic relationship to her painting. In the course of the past two decades, Julie Mehretu (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1970) has unfolded a remarkably coherent and powerful body of work that has won international acclaim for its way of rendering the complexity of today’s world. A keen listener and reader, she collects emblematic images of current and historical events, which often become a source of inspiration for the creation of new works.
Julie Mehretu. A universal history of everything and nothing reveals a continued and active reflection on painting as a medium that speaks to us in the present. The selection of works on view is all the more significant for being post-9-11, a turbulent period in which war and its spectacle —violence, racism and crimes against humanity— have become an all-too-daily occurrence. The intricate layers of Mehretu’s work echo the permanent flux of the city —war and peace, prosperity, decadence and renewal— and speak to us, fundamentally, about the individual within the complex social and political dynamics that inform the world in which we live.
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Photos: 1, 2 & 4 Tom Powell Imaging. 3 Ben Westoby
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1. INKCITY (CHART), 1996 This drawing is part of a series of very early works on paper by Julie Mehretu on view in this exhibition. Her visual vocabulary refers to graphs and charts, usually used to represent a set of data, and prefigures the way future works will be structured. One can also decipher the key concerns the artist will root her artistic research in: how urban planning and architecture both structure and represent the social order and human exchanges of all nature.
3. INVISIBLE LINE (COLLECTIVE), 2010-11 Julie Mehretu initially conceived this monumental canvas to be displayed in Punta Della Dogana, a museum located in the former Customs Office of Venice. It takes its cue from the rich history of the city of merchants, where the exchange of goods and people is reflected through its extraordinary architecture and intricate network of canals, as depicted by the lines and clouds of black ink applied to the surface of the painting. Also on view is this exhibition is Aether (Venice), a work created at the same time to be exhibited alongside it.
2. CITADEL, 2005 The notion of palimpsest appears clearly in this painting, in which architectural plans and aerial views are accumulated in layers to create a complex composition, which evokes the buildup of architectural elements found in most cities. As time elapses, buildings are modified and street plans change. All this reflects the evolution of people’s use of public and private space and creates a historical perspective.
4. CONJURED PARTS (SEKHMET), 2016 The Conjured Parts series of paintings is directly related to the civil war that has destroyed Syria over the past few years. The starting point of each of these works is usually a press photograph related to the conflict that depicts urban devastation. Layers of brushstrokes and ink markings are applied atop the image, perhaps representing healing and reconstruction or the way those images are buried in the collective unconscious as they disappear from newspapers and screens. This work is named after an Egyptian goddess of war, also known as a goddess of healing.