Educational workshop “Jasper Johns”

The IVAM has organized an educational workshop on the occasion of the exhibition “Jasper Johns. The traces of memory” that reproduces the creative process in the graphic oeuvre of this brilliant artist.

The educational workshop, to which we can gain access through a big dartboard, explores Jasper Johns’ typographic world. The inside is shaped as a circular blue space, with a huge blue and yellow dartboard drawn in the ground on which some tables that reproduces a Jasper Johns’ work about numbers are located. Besides, some music composed by Morton Feldman, a friend of Jasper Johns, can be heard.

During the workshop, which follows guidelines similar to those used by Jasper Johns in his compositions, the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) and the so-called no colours (white, grey and black) are used. These colours are applied by means of oily waxes which texture is similar to the encaustics used by Jasper Johns in a lot of his works and which consist on a mixing of painting and hot wax. The result of this mixing is a more consistent painting that enables to draw the outline of numbers, letters or dartboards. Once finished the background of their composition, the workshop participants move the paper to a typographic box and they engrave the numbers by rubbing them with a wax bar, in the same way that Jasper Johns used industrial templates. Once the numbers are transferred to the composition, the lines can be highlighted and more wax can be superimposed wherever it is required.

Jasper Johns’ graphic oeuvre, including etchings on copper and lithographs, is immense. Following Picasso and Matisse, printmaking is an omnipresent feature in his everyday activity and, as a printmaker, he has gone beyond and altered the techniques that he has used. In the works showed in this exhibition, the artist focuses on the symbols of non-verbal communication that have appeared recurrently in his artistic output.

From his very first works, Jasper Johns has tried to find a limit, looking for the consecutive situations in which the image, while losing its integrity, remains perceived as such. The extraordinary invention showed by the pictures painted in the fifties about flags and dartboards prefigures the researches of the later conceptual artists and it is also the origin of his figures and alphabets. As a result of the methodical division of the area of the picture, Jasper Johns engraved letters or figures in regular boxes, avoiding any research about the spelling in the same way that the alphabetical and numerical parade challenges any idea of the speech shaping this way a kind of visual neutrality.

From 5 years old

25 people

Tuesdays to Fridays 09:30 a.m– 1:30 p.m. and 3.30 p.m – 6:30 p.m . Schools must reserve in advanced. Sundays’ schedule 11:00 a.m, 12:00 p.m, and 1:00 p.m.

The workshop takes lasts 1h. 30 min per group.

These workshops are addressed to all types of public: students, adults, occupational centres, etc.

Contact telephone 96 3365913