ARTIFICIAL (Contemporary Figures)
20th of January to 15th of March
MACBA is soon to present ARTIFICIAL. Contemporary Figures, a group exhibition which will be open to the public from January 20 to March 15, 1998. The exhibition consists of approximately 30 works created by almost 20 artists of international prestige. Each of these artists assumes a different perspective, but all coincide in their wish to explore the relationship between artistic creation and the familiar objects of everyday life, considering the power of seduction such objects hold upon us. The common denominator which Is present in their respective strategies reveals a shared intention: the attempt to blur the difference between representation and reality while including the construction of perfectly finished and easily identifiable images and objects as • concrete substances" of our environment.
With this project the museum invites us to reflect upon the definItIon of contemporary art, its inevitable fictional condition and its undeniable capacity for contributing to the increase in our knowledge of things - wheiher they be subjectively relevant or anecdotal - which form part of our everyday life. ARTIFICIAL Contemporary Figures is also an attempt to stimulate the dialogue concerning the role of popular icons in contemporary society, the importance of consumerism and the repertoire of stereotypes which govern our perception of reality.
This exhibition consists of three parts. The first gathers a small number of historical works created from the 60's onwards by artists such as Gerhard Richter, Malcom Morley, Franz Gertsch, Duane Hanson. Richard Artschwager and John Baldessari. These artists were interested in using photographic techniques and applying traditionally pictoral procedures in order to create works of distinct objectivity whilst trying to elude a symbolic language. This does not result in a lack of vividness in their representation of reality. The following reflection by E.H. Gombrich illustrates such a perspective "the act of painting is an active controversy against the world. In this way, the artist is more likely to see what he paints than paint what he sees."
The second and most extensive section contains work by those artists of the generation which in the main has achieved maturity of expression in the past fifteen years. The artistic manipulation of the status of the familiar object and the documentary function of photography and cinema play a central role here. The confrontation between what we objectively see in this exhibition (medications, sweets, a bicycle, a dissected horse ... ) and the actual artistic intention of these works is precisely what generates our distrust towards the images: they have been conferred with "reality', invested with a new meaning which makes possible both the added value of the artistic contribution and the legitimate context in which it appears The exhibition finishes with the film installation "The Sense of the End" by the London-based Canadian artist Mark Lewis and with the specific pro1ect SIMO by the artist Jordi Colomer