Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

The question of whether photography was a social document or fine art began to lose currency in the work of some artists, who continued to insist on documenting their period in history while still exploring the near-infinite aesthetic possibilities of photography. Josef Koudelka (Moravia, Czechoslovakia [currently Czech Republic], 1938) started to photograph the Roma of Eastern Europe in 1961. After a stay in Romania, he arrived in Prague the day before the Prague Spring of 1968, which he photographed extensively although somewhat furtively. The images of clashes between Soviet troops and Czech citizens were taken out of the country in 1969 by his friend and collaborator Anna Fárova, and were distributed by Magnum to the major worldwide media with their authorship concealed to protect Koudelka’s freedom. In 1970, with a three-month visa which allowed him to continue documenting the lives of the Eastern European Roma people, he made the decision not to return to his home country and move to England as a refugee. He remained there until 1980, when he emigrated to Paris and obtained French nationality in 1987.

The themes of exile, nomadism, ineffability and the crudeness of the passage of time can be seen in his work, in compositions that, in spite of precisely capturing the “decisive moment”, give the appearance of being conceptualised beforehand. It is important to remember that this exhibition was made before the fall of the Iron Curtain, the dismembering of the USSR, and the final split between Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

The title of this exhibition is a reference to an engraving by Goya from the Disasters of War series, and raises two main issues in the work of John Baldessari (National City, 1931 – Venice, California, US, 2020): On the one hand, the representation of violence in its many facets, including previously occurring moments of tension and stress; on the other, the use of previous artistic references and the appropriation of images from other contexts or belonging to other artists – fundamental characteristics of Pop art, for which Baldessari was a reference. His influence as a teacher and artist has been acknowledged by artists such as Jenny Holzer, David Salle, Matt Mullican and Barbara Kruger.

This exhibition was divided into two parts. The introduction emphasized critical aspects of his career, where choice and decision-making were an essential part of the play between creation and perception, or the use of various ordering devices is seen as an original tactic for creating meaning, as in the piece in the IVAM’s collection, A Movie: Directional Piece where People are Walking (1972-1973). In the second part of the exhibition, Baldessari shows a preference for appropriated film scenes whose main content is violence, hence the specific reference to Goya’s etchings. His approach is obviously influenced by the mass media, and focuses on the importance of scientific and popular imagery as societal story-telling. Other decisive aspects of his works are the importance of the subliminal side of images and the variety of interpretations that can be made of them; the unforeseen, and play, seen as forces for creativity and meaning; and naturally, catastrophe and sex as primary themes that interrelate with many other secondary issues.

Many accidents of fate have befallen the paintings of Pierre Soulages (Rodez, France, 1919) since his first exhibition in Paris in 1947. His artistic viewpoint seems to incorporate the existential nature of the passing of time, reflected in the smallest – though not innocent – acts of the work of painting. This 1989 exhibition at the IVAM Centre Julio González was preceded by the artist’s exhibition at the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, where his work was included in the first three editions of the documenta, between 1955 and 1964.

Soulages’ abstract, expressionistic work has been related to what is known as Tachisme, a tendency that showed and exhibited by negating what is said, or what is unsaid. A tache is a stain or mark that covers or may conceal something, but with Soulage, the tache appears to reveal a fear of emptiness; but with Soulages, covering over things seemed to in some way reveal a fear of emptiness. Being stains, they emerged as paintings.

After the sixties Soulages’ painting became eminently black, only interrupted in the following decade when he returned to rhythmic compositions. Black defines a terrain where colour is worked as tension between strokes; through the brushstrokes, light seems to want to emerge, to represent itself and seek references. Good examples of this intention are the large works such as 14 Aout 1979, which is a single stroke nearly three metres long. This exhibition helped recover the figure of Soulages, who had been relegated to oblivion for some time, as a crucial contributor to European abstract art. His work recovers classical canons, processing them through the dark, sincere hue of existentialism.

In the work of Pablo Ruiz Picasso (Málaga, 1881 – Mougins, France, 1973), drawing is not an auxiliary or complementary procedure but an indispensable tool. Drawing is a mental act which always involves a selection and emphasis of particular elements. Picasso’s artistic development was favoured by his family environment and encouraged by his father as he grew up. From 1893 the maturity of his line and his technical skill began to be evident. He made drawings in an academic style, but combining them with other compositions based on his own inspiration and observation of the world around him.

At the turn of the century, Picasso’s work shows a reaction against philosophical naturalism and he shifted towards an alignment with the new artistic languages of the avant gardes. From Paris, feeling becomes the primary matter of his work; he depicts the scenes of his life as they pass by, disregarding classical compositional rules. The period from 1906 to 1917 is characterised by a mixture of styles and creative freedom influenced by Iberian sculpture, African art and the schematic reduction of Paul Cezanne, a great influence for the artist and many others living in Paris in the early twentieth century. Since then, Picasso attempted to reduce nature to geometrical forms, in a process of intellectualisation led by intuition and sensitivity.

This exhibition of the artist’s work, which coincides with the opening of the IVAM, is also symbolically important because of the close relationship between Picasso and Julio González and their influence on one another. The importance of the drawing medium for both artists is a meeting point in their parallel trajectories; the two artists worked independently, but in mutual awareness.

Pop art has been represented in the IVAM Collection since its beginnings, and has been a fundamental line in our research. The collection includes works by representative artists such as Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Öyvind Fahlström, Claes Oldenburg, Valerio Adami, Eduardo Arroyo and others. The inclusion of Equipo Crónica grounds the collection solidly in the historical memory of a period in Spain that was much more than a mere artistic tendency. To the team’s political confrontation with the Franco dictatorship must be added their continual analysis of classical Spanish art (Velázquez and Goya, principally), and international modernity from the early twentieth century to their own time.

Equipo Crónica was founded by Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and Joan Antoni Toledo (who was only a member for a year) in 1965 after an exhibition organised by Vicente Aguilera Cerni in October 1964 at the Ateneo de València. During the same period, another representative group, Estampa Popular de Valencia, was also founded, whose similarities with Equipo Crónica were merely formal, as Solbes and Valdés’ main premise was their socio-political commitment to criticise the Franco regime and its curtailment of freedom using aesthetic reflection as one of their tools. In the exhibition was a text by the historian and critic Tomás Llorens, who was one of the main architects of the IVAM’s creation in the late 1980s, and a supporter of Equipo Crónica’s work in the Institut’s early acquisitions for its collection.
After the death of Solbes in November 1981, Equipo Crónica disappeared, after an intense, fruitful and committed trajectory, thoroughly represented in this exhibition. The IVAM Collection holds more than one hundred works by the team, including paintings, drawings, engravings and posters.