Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Seldom has an exhibition so clearly defined a museum programme as Spiritual America did at the IVAM Centre del Carme. The architecture of this part of the museum is highly representative and pushes younger or mid-career artists to make specific installations; whereas the Centre Julio González exhibits art histories in their most representative tendencies and names. With a catalogue conceived by the artist as an art piece in itself, Richard Prince (Panama Canal Zone, 1949) began what was known as the Col·lecció Centre del Carme series of publications. Many of these, as well as some of the posters in the series, (in this case also designed by Prince) became cult publications.

The work of Richard Prince is known for his appropriation of images from the mass media (television advertisements, films, magazines and other sources), for conversion into autonomous art works in which opposing elements are paired. The idea of the autonomous art work is disputed, with some seeing art as an ideological instrument and others as a thing in itself, in isolation, with its own rules of communication. Whichever way we see it, Prince considers that any situation can give rise to an image that can then become an artwork susceptible to interpretation.

The principle content of this exhibition was a series of photographs ‘lifted’ from Marlboro cowboy adverts, and the re-use of comic strips from magazines, particularly the New Yorker. In answer to critiques of his work claiming that he had “stolen” images from other photographers or graphic designers, Prince has always preferred to describe his work as “piracy”. Piracy here is the same thing that multinational brands do when they appropriate identities and principles – such as freedom – to encourage consumption of their products. Spiritual America confirms the IVAM’s support of pluralistic, critical, contemporary pop art.

The issue of representation is an intrinsic part of any discussion on the function of art. In order to certify a tendency we need a view of the whole, a collective view of what comprises a particular context. This exhibition was given the title of what was first a famous television programme and then a well-known book by the writer John Berger. Ways of Seeing was, for its curators, a “subjective, partial view revolving around the last ten years of painting in the Valencian region; (…) which does not intend to exhibit a ‘school’ (sic) or a generation, and certainly not of a ‘Valencian’ manner of seeing or understanding art”. It was a “passionate commitment to nine artists whose work extends far beyond the geographical borders they happen to have lived in”.

This (to some extent) generational commitment may be of great help in understanding some of the later movements relating to the importance or unimportance of art as a driving force for transformation, or simply as a mere historical record. It also invites us to notice the partisan use of art in changing cultural politics. The varied trajectories of the artists, some of which focus on the university, on activism or performative practices, some of which follow a more canonical approach, can now be seen as an explicit, well-documented piece of a period in Spanish and Valencian art history.

The first exhibition at the IVAM Centre del Carme fulfilled its purpose of displaying the work of young, internationally-known artists who at that moment were providing new perspectives on contemporary art. While emphasis was given to artists who made specific interventions in the splendid architecture of the Ferreres and Goerlich museum rooms, the inclusion of José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) focused discussion on painting of an abstract, expressionist leaning whose makers, however, avoided defining it as such, preferring to escape hackneyed labels.

In Sicilia’s paintings from 1987 and 1988, we see a search for a fertile dialogue between form and background, but also between the painting and the canvas, with the latter understood as a container and the former the content; and also an attempt to break away from the aforementioned formalistic conceptions. Outlines of plantlike figures, particularly flowers, appear in fusion with the background but marking out an organic terrain that contrasts with geometric figures. The duality between painting and canvas, that is, between the painted matter integrated as an abyss into the support, is a reflection of the duality between the organic and geometric, the solid or opaque and the transparent or veiled.

Sicilia studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, and moved to Paris in 1980, where he shared his artistic exploration and discoveries with the artist Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948 – Cercedilla, 2018). He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Plastic Arts Prize) in 1989.

Walker Evans (Saint Louis, Missouri, US, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, US, 1975) wanted to be a writer, then became a press photographer and reputed professor as well as a reporter. His photographs have become part of the History of art in their own right; his projects and photobooks can without doubt be said to have marked the development of photography over the following decades, and some of his images have become icons of the modern age. His work for the Farm Security Administration photographic project, supported by the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt and coordinated by Roy Stryker, brought together a group of outstanding photographers whose ranks include Dorothea Lange, Ben Shann, Louise Rosskam and Jack Delano.

Havana 1933 brings together Evan’s photographic illustrations for The Crime of Cuba, a book by the politically committed writer Carleton Beals, made over a period of three weeks in spring 1933, when the island was being governed by Gerardo Machado. Machado’s government, which ended the same year, had turned into a bloody dictatorship. The scenes in this series show ordinary people like peasant farmers, prostitutes, beggars and the unemployed, but also the Cuban elite in Evans’ characteristic compositions: different types of architecture, urban signposting, frontal views and a certain distancing, which is not cold but reveals Evans as a great observer and newcomer to Cuban reality.

This exhibition was the first to bring together all of the photographs in the Havana series, practically unseen until then. It underscored Evans’ importance in later photographic history. The American photographer can unmistakeably be situated as a key figure in the transition between what we know as documentary photography and photography as an artistic or “plastic” discipline as defined by Dominique Baqué.

Some exhibitions pursue aims that go beyond the basic necessity of showing a collection of works by the same artist. For certain artists, a particular city can mean much more than a birthplace or one to live and work in. For Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Valencia, 1863 – Madrid, 1923), Valencia was a trove of symbolic and emotional properties. Similarly, the city (and many of its inhabitants) equate the painter’s gaze with something resembling a collective identity. Technical and formal characteristics of Sorolla’s paintings such as projected light, the clarity reflected in his subjects’ bodies, fabric and objects, the depiction of an evocative Mediterranean atmosphere, the artist’s genuine capacity to freeze a moment in time, with every movement occurring at once, are aspects that have come to be fused with the city and the education of the painter’s gaze.

While the chronological history of the IVAM began with Ignacio Pinazo, who was fourteen years older than Sorolla, localising the museum’s perspective as a means to propose its own narrative of universal art history with Valencia situated on the international map, the exhibition of Sorolla’s work positioned the IVAM in its own city. It was visited by thousands of viewers, and it was an introduction to a gradual process of education on modern and contemporary art. The wide range of styles and semantic plurality in art which the IVAM sought to incorporate in its early years marked out a new, successful path.

Photography has been an interest in the IVAM collection ever since its first acquisitions in 1986, and we have also tried to integrate the medium naturally into our exhibition programme. Gabriél Cualladó (Massanassa, 1925 – Madrid, 2003) was one of the photographers who best combined the photographer’s personal gaze with the spontaneity of the medium itself. Cuallado claimed to be an “amateur”; perhaps because he had no need to make a profession out of his work, over the years he built up a body of strongly empathetic, sincere work. The people around him, family and friends, and later on, a collective portrait of his profession, colleagues and symbolic places from his childhood, complete his oeuvre, in which a quiet way of being predominates.

This was the first exhibition to be dedicated to Cualladó, and presented a series of photographs made from 1955–1989, together with the photo-essays París (Paris, 1962), La Cervecería Alemana (German Beer, late 60s), La Real Sociedad Fotográfica (1979, 1982), El Rastro de Madrid (The Madrid Rastro, 1980–1981), and La Albufera (1985). The images selected bring together those that particularly interested the artist, even at the expense of some of his best-known works. To the scenes or intimate portraits of familiar people and places, Cualladó added a number of series in which the emphasis continues to be on his subjects’ closeness, expressing the simple, sincere gestures of anonymous people and places he was visiting for the first time. Gabriel Cualladó’s ability to look long and closely was a previous, necessary stage to another of his skills – choosing what to photograph.

Almost a year after this exhibition, in the group project Els paisatges de Joanot Martorell. Gandia i La Safor (The Landscapes of Joanot Martorell. Gandía and La Safor), also exhibited at the IVAM, Cualladó once again showed that the empathy of the photographer is a strange, infrequent synthetic capacity that conjoins knowing how to look with letting things happen.

These two early exhibitions by Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, 1929) established the IVAM’s clear conceptual stance and high level of demand regarding its research and dissemination of Pop art. A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages, with Coosje van Bruggen, shows Oldenburg’s work as a sculptor of works in public spaces, where everyday objects are gigantically reproduced, impacting their domestic ubiquity and usage. A toothbrush, a melting plug, a bottle with its own message cut into its surface, a saw, a torch, screw or used match, are all turned into monuments – sculptures, in short – reminding us of their function as objects by their conversion into art pieces.

Dibujos 1959-1989 gathered together thirty years of the artist’s work in ninety drawn projects, only some of which later became projects for public sculptures. Both of these exhibitions travelled to the IVAM on itineraries shared with other European art centres, consolidating the museum’s international position. Oldenburg sees his work as relating to the trifles of everyday existence, and to spontaneous accidents that acquire an immutable presence in the form of massive objects.

Any of the museums promoted by the Spanish state during the democratic period from 1977 to the mid-eighties have a compulsory mission to restore historically forgotten or silenced memory. Since its beginnings, the IVAM has dedicated space in its collection to this task, and programmed a set of exhibitions focusing on the recovery and writing of lost or ruptured modernity.

A restitution of the figure of Nicolás de Lekuona (Ordizia, Guipuzcoa, 1913 – Fruniz, Vizcayan battlefront, 1937), must first overcome the fact that even his very existence has been cast into doubt. De Lekuona was one of the select, avant-garde group of artists, philosophers, writers and musicians who were wanting to renew the sombre panorama of Spain still licking the wounds of the loss of its empire. He took part in the literary gatherings at the Café de Pombo, having moved from San Sebastián to Madrid to study Quantity Surveying. His use of photography, which he saw as a mechanical medium that prioritised the copy over the uniqueness of the artwork, and which allowed an absolute variety of motifs that could transcend a particular style, led him in two directions. He made photographs in a constructivist style tending towards the renovations of the New Photography movement, which he came to know through magazines such as L’ilustration; and also photomontages in the line of the European avant gardes, Surrealism and Dadaism in particular. With this recuperation of the figure of De Lekuona contributed to the slow marking out of the black hole in Spanish history, but also contributed to filling it in with the work of the great exiled intellectual figures.

This exhibition recuperating the figure of De Lekuona contributed to the gradual outlining of the black hole in Spanish history, but also helped to fill in the lacuna with the work of the great figures of its exile.

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.