Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Suma y sigue del arte contemporáneo was a fundamental magazine dealing with art criticism and theory during the 1960s. Published by José Huguet and with Vicente Aguilera Cerni as editor between 1962 and 1967, it became a path by which international trends and aesthetic debates were introduced into Spain. Its pages began to insist on the exhaustion of Informalism, and proposals connected with Op Art and Kinetic Art and the new forms of realism were developed. Important art critics such as Giulio Carlo Argan, José María Moreno Galván and Pierre Restany were published in Suma y sigue del arte contemporáneo. The magazine also collaborated very closely with various artists who designed its covers: Equipo Crónica, Monjalés, Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tàpies and Joan- Josep Tharrats, among others.

Zineb Sedira (Paris, 1963) explores the landscape of Algeria in a very warm, personal way, linking personal experiences with historical or political aspects while at the same time concentrating especially on questions concerning the desire of many of the country’s citizens to move away, to leave.

That is why her photographs, videos and installations are characterised by using the perspective of her own experience to preserve and transmit the memory of the past as a legacy for future generations.

A rather melancholy idea, interweaving the urgency of having to depart with the desire to remain, which often gives rise to a profound feeling of rootlessness, wherever one may be.

In this exhibition, therefore, Zineb Sedira will explore the notions of family, tradition, oral history, migration and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge in order to address the issue of cultural displacement and the personal and social consequences of migration.

The show, curated by Baptiste Brun, comprises a meticulous selection of about two hundred works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and engravings, together with many documents and objects, with which we are able to offer the public an approach to the work of Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901–Paris, 1985) from a new perspective based on history, culture and anthropology. The project is developed in ten different sections that revolve around three fundamental themes: “Celebration of the Common Man”, “Ethnography in Actuality” and “Criticism of Culture”. The exhibition has been conceived and created by the MuCEM in coproduction with the IVAM and MEG. This project is supported by the Fondation Dubuffet in Paris and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, and also by many European institutions and private collections.

Exceptionally, for the first time in Spain, an exhibition of a major group of works from this crucial creative period in Dutch art is being made available by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which received contributions from the IVAM Collection for the show that it devoted to Julio González in 2017. This new case study enables us to contextualise part of that museum’s collection, concentrating on the expressive and representational qualities of figurative art in the period between the wars, and featuring emblematic artists such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, together with the more existential works of the Dutch artists.

Figuration in all its varied forms was a constant feature in the theoretical discourses of 20th-century art, alongside the other dominant concepts, which concentrated on abstraction and surrealism. This alternative, focusing on a study of the human condition, was a return to representation which served as a refuge for a world teetering between barbarity and savagery during the period between the wars. Figuration flourished extensively in European countries such as Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.

In the area of the realist techniques that define the figurative approach an outstanding place is occupied by the acute and penetrating gazes of artists such as Charley Toorop (1891–1955) and Pyke Koch (1901–1991), who contributed their enveloping atmospheres to Dutch Magic Realism and expanded the enormously complex and diverse typology of the concept of the portrait.