2021:MACBA REAFFIRMS ITS COMMITMENT TO SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN ART
The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), one of the most important institutions on the Spanish cultural circuit, presented its complete programme for 2021. Among the activities and exhibitions, two stand out: a retrospective of the Cuban visual artist Félix Gonzalez-Torres (Guaiamaro, 1957 - Miami, 1996) and the rescheduling of the exhibition of the Rafael Tous collection, originally scheduled for November 2020.
Both exhibitions not only confirm the relevance of MACBA's activity in Spain, but also highlight its importance throughout Europe for the promotion of contemporary Hispanic and Latin American productions.
Félix González-Torres. Política de la relación will be inaugurated on March 25th and will remain at the museum until September 12th. According to the MACBA press conference, the exhibition aims to focus on the artwork of the Cuban artist in a post-colonial reading in order to trace new links between American cultures and Spain. To this end, the exhibition, curated by Tanya Barson —MACBA's chief curator— will focus on questions of identity, authority and memory related to González-Torres' personal life as an exile and, consequently, as a model that goes beyond the biographical to become universal.
The exhibition is approached from the perspective of Edouard Glissant, Caribbean writer and thinker, who speaks of the "poetics of relationship" as a need for opacity in the face of total transparency. The MACBA team affirms that the work of González-Torres, in addition to its conceptual openness, "is comparable to Glissant's position because of the emphasis they both place on mutability, as well as the dynamics and poetics of the relationship, a concept that can be extended to the politics of the relationship".
As for the exhibition of In Real Time. The Rafael Tous Collection of Conceptual Art, curated by Antònia María Perelló - curator and head of the MACBA Collection - and Clàudia Segura - curator of exhibitions and the Collection - whose inauguration as part of the MACBA's 35th anniversary was affected by the pandemic, has been rescheduled for 13 May. Concentrating mainly on the work of artists from the 1970s and 1980s on the Spanish scene, the Rafael Tous Collection is one of the most significant in the region in terms of conceptual art.
The exhibition is conceived in such a way that works by all the artists in the collection are exhibited under a vision of common thematic and conceptual interests. On the other hand, En tiempo real. La Colección Rafael Tous de arte conceptual (In Real Time. Rafael Tous Collection of conceptual art) goes beyond the walls of the museum: as a tribute to the artist Jordi Benito (Granollers, 1951 - Bareclona, 2008), the oeuvre Les portes de Linares, originally created for the space, will be presented in the legendary Sala Metrònom.
