Presentation: “ZERO and post-war art in Europe”

Bartomeu Marí, the curator of the exhibition, Barbara Könches, director of the ZERO Foundation and Nuria Enguita, director of the IVAM present the exhibition Far from the Void. ZERO and post-war art in Europe..

The exhibition reviews the groups of artists who overcame the aesthetic and existentialist atmosphere of the post-war period by rejecting expressionist painting, the gestural abstraction of Matterism and the Informalism that dominated the art scene after the Second World War.

The contributions of the young artists gathered in the exhibition were central to the “big bang” of art in the 1960s. Considering ZERO and the contemporary groups that shared the same spirit and formed a dense network of contacts, exhibitions, publications and events (Azimut, Nul, Gruppo T, Gruppo N, Equipo 57, and Nove Tendencije, among others), the exhibition shows “congregations” of artists who operated without a creed or a unified intellectual leadership, but with the shared ambition to “start from scratch” and find a new way of making and enjoying art.

The exhibition brings together over a hundred works by more than thirty artists (Mack, Piene, Uecker, Manzoni, Castellani, Klein, Tinguely, Fontana, Dadamaino, Grazia Varisco, Nanda Vigo, Megert, Peeters, Haacke, Verheyen, Schoonhoven, and Daniel Spoerri, among many others), as well as numerous documents and archives.