426 Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Cesar Domela, Luigi Veronesi, Augusto Agero, Max Bill, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Theo van Doesburg, Georges Vantongerloo, Frantisek Kupka, Bart van der Lek, Karel Teige, Leon Tutundjan, Otto Freudlich or Pierre Soulages and Sean Scully, who far from breaking away with reality and history, offer a newer and more synthetic translation of the visible World. It is undeniable that creative abstraction is promoted by individualism, thanks to which today we can witness unique works derived from the most experimental thinking. In the same way, gestural art gathered by abstract expressionism can be contemplated in artists such as Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith or Lee Krasner. European and, specially, Spanish informalism have, beyond any doubt, a remarkable strength in the works by Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Asger Jorn, Arshile Gorky, Karel Appel or Henri Michaux. We can state that with these two movements (European informalism and North American abstract expressionism) easels and brushes were abandoned to establish a more direct and intense, even violent, relationship with the work, as if the artist wanted to literally penetrate the canvas in search of answers inside the painting and not through it. Constructivism has an important presence in the IVAM’s collection as one can observe in the Russian vanguards formed by artists such as El Lissitzsky, Varvara Stepanova, Valentina Kulagina, Gustav Klucis or Rodchenko, but also with works from other regions brought to us by Joaquín Torres-García. In spite of historical vanguards being struck with maturity in the nineteen fifties, it did not mean they were meant to disappear, but on the contrary, we could state they never disappeared from the artistic scene, because their influence and strength prevented them from completely trashing all of those precepts and the spirit that renovated and promoted art in all of its facets and directions causing a deep rupture with traditional conventions thanks to the opening of new creative paths. Therefore, this reform of ideas provided great renovations in every sphere of culture and society, which are still useful today for many artists to work with and reinterpret from a contemporary point of view. American and Spanish pop from the nineteen fifties on is very significantly connected to the IVAM s collection through artists such as Jasper Johns, John Cage, Lee Bontecou, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, Erró, Richard Linder, Valerio Adami, John Baldessari, Claes Oldenburg, Öyvind Fahsltröm, Richard Hamilton, Robert Rauchenberg, Equipo Crónica, Equipo Realidad, Juan Genovés, Manuel Valdés or Eduardo Arroyo. Either in its European and American currents, pop art, in its most critical or superficial aspect, triggers a turning point in the way the world is conceived. It breaks the barriers between art and the market, and fusions the arts in their totality appealing to the creativity of senses and to the recreation of the performance in daily life itself. Today we are still living and assimilating part of the great legacy pop artists left us with. As we approach contemporaneity, the elements of artistic production get more and more intimate, personal and deprived of an aesthetic load in the sense of classical schemes. They acquire isolated forms, they escape frames, emerge from a group choreography to gain independence and turn the object into the centre of all glances. Through these works, art focuses on perhaps the most mundane happenings of any life, for the viewer to gain awareness and therefore empower him to react or reflect over monotony and conventionalism. Installations, new media and social realism have a place in the collection as we can witness in works like those by Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta- Clark, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Dieter Roth, Allan Mccollum, Tony Oursler, Juan Muñoz, Charles Simonds, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Cristina Iglesias, John Davies, Tony Cragg, Bruce Nauman, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Juan Uslé, Terry Winters, Albert Oehlen, Markus Lupertz, Georg Baselitz, Bernardí Roig, Christian Boltanski, Zoran Music, Alberto Corazón, Luis Gordillo, Joan Cardells, Carmen Calvo, Miquel Navarro, Jordi Colomer, Darío Villalba, José Sanleón, Natividad Navalón, Cristino de Vera or Gianluigi Colin. Analysing these works, we realise that from the eighties on, and mainly during the nineties, art creates a new narrative, as a response to external forces linked to capitalism, from which it pursues new goals, values and principles absent of any organised aesthetic progression. Along similar lines emerge another series of video-artists such as John Whitney, Antoni Muntadas, Júlio Quaresma, Eugenio Ampudia or Bigas Luna involved in the audiovisual and new technology fields to propose, from a multimedia perspective located in an urban scenario, several symbolic frameworks in which the subject’s perception and his visual perception converge, leading to the fusion between the world of artistic representation and daily life with a very specific character and language. Bearing this historical and artistic context in mind, the IVAM takes advantage of its XXV anniversary showcase not only its unique and appreciated collection, but the cultural management it has developed during these decades to continue growing and taking on new artistic challenges. The museum has known how to establish a sensitive relation with society for it to satisfy its cultural aspirations, as well as focusing on didactics as a pedagogic tool to make contemporary art accessible to all publics. On the other hand, the museum has always been near to innovation and research, to transmission of knowledge, to international diffusion of local and national artists, to reorganising its funds to make them more attractive, to creating of a multidisciplinary activity programme, to restoring artistic heritage, developing new technology based initiatives, managing agreements with institutions from around the globe putting Valencia on the map, building complicity with artists and, in conclusion, committing with everyday reality. The correct functioning of these precepts has translated into a success in the number of visitors to the museum. Precisely, this last decade, during my time as head of the museum, I feel satisfied for establishing an artistic network with South America which has currently turned into a reference for European and North American museums both in the spheres of theory, due to the International Meetings of South American Dialogues, as in art thanks to the exhibiting agreements reached with the best cultural insti
Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
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