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La leyenda del sueño. Retrospektive eines der Pioniere der Konzeptkunst in Kolumbien. 2014/2015, MAM Medellín. Kuratorin: María Belén Sáez de Ibarra
Dez 2014Als Fortsetzung der kuratorialen Politik einer Anerkennung der Laufbahn wichtiger kolumbianischer Künstler und als letzte Ausstellung des Jahres eröffnete das Museum Moderner Kunst von Medellin am 26. November 2014 die fünfte Edition seiner Serie Homages MAMM, die dem Schaffen von Álvaro Barrios gewidmet ist.
Die erfolgreich präsentierten vorhergehenden Versionen dieses Programms waren: Debora Arango, Yo fui pintando lo que fui viendo [Ich malte, was ich sah]; Beatriz Gonzalez, La Comedia y la Tragedia 1948-2010 [Die Komödie und die Tragödie]; <iphasize>Deseo y Tormento: Luis Caballero, 1968-1992</iphasize> [Verlangen und Peinigung: Luis Caballero, 1968-1992] und <iphasize>Coordenadas. Historias de la instalación en Antioquia</iphasize> [Koordinaten. Geschichten der Installation in Antioquia]. In Kooperation mit der Zentralbank von Kolumbien präsentiert das Museum jetzt etwa 90 Werke von Álvaro Barrios (Zeichnungen, Installationen, Gemälde, Grafiken und Fotografien), um sein Lebenswerk zu würdigen.
Grundelemente der Ausstellung
Vor zwei Jahren zeigte Álvaro Barrios seine Werke letztmalig in Medellín in der Galería de La Oficina. Jetzt kehrt er in die Stadt mit dieser Ausstellung zurück, die neben einer Reihe von Werken, welche Zeugnis von seiner Arbeit in den letzten 50 Jahren ablegen, auch drei neue Arbeiten enthält: die beiden großformatigen Installationen El mar de Cristóbal Colón [Das Meer des Christoph Kolumbus] und Dick Tracy y la Esfinge de Diamantes [Dick Tracy und die Diamanten-Sphinx] sowie ein 9 Meter langes Gemälde mit dem Titel <iphasize>La multiplicación de los cuadros</iphasize> [Die Multiplikation der Bilder].
Es muss erwähnt werden, das die Kuratorin María Belén Sáez an das Schaffen von Barrios aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln herangeht, die sie für grundlegend für das Verständnis seines Werkes erachtet: esoterische Recherche, spirituelle Praktiken und die Installation und konzeptuelle Dimensionen seines Werkes.
Die Kuratorin sagte, "es ist keine chronologische Ausstellung. Sie ist nicht nach Perioden kategorisiert. Stattdessen haben wir eine Art Universum des Künstlers aufgebaut. Das Hauptthema seiner Werke ist die Kritik am Sammeln von Kunst und an allem, was mit dem kommerziellen Aspekt von Kunst zu tun hat. Álvaro Barrios Kunst der Appropriation ist aufständisch, rebellisch."
Zu dieser Ausstellung gehört unter anderem etwas, was der Künstler erläutert: "Eine Reihe von Dokumenten, die klar veranschaulichen, wo mein Interesse für Comics herkommt. Das Publikum, die Kritiker oder die Journalisten mögen vielleicht denken, dass es von der Pop-Art kommen könnte. Aber das hat nichts mit Pop-Art zu tun, sondern mit meiner Kindheit. Ein paar der Werke lassen erkennen, wie ich Comics zeichnete seit ich zwölf war."
Kuratorialer Text von María Belén Sáez de Ibarra
This exhibition encompasses nearly fifty years of Álvaro Barrios’ work, starting from the beginning of his artistic career in the mid-sixties. From the large body of work of all these years, the curatorship has tried to give privilege to his installations, as the artist never before in his long career has had his installations as the main focus of his exhibitions. The exhibition comprises from works of tiny format to others of ample use of space, all of which are included in another big installation, which is the exhibition itself, thus recreating Barrios’ world, which flows between the micro and the macrocosm. This dynamic stirs the exhibition towards unknown associations between the exhibited works.
The focus of this revision has been put on an aspect that has gone almost unnoticed on his previous exhibitions but which is perhaps the one that can illustrate better Barrios’ individual process of growth as an artist and help us understand deeply his creative process in harmony with his process of personal knowledge and learning: we are talking about Barrios’ vision of the creative process as functioning in a wider constellation, beyond the ego and the conscious mind (in the area of no knowledge) and his idea that all existence is a habitat of multiple relations in perpetual motion that surpass what we have socially imagined as time and space.
His process in this journey towards depersonalization and other ways of comprehending that we are not self-sufficient or the center of the universe, has taken him towards the esotericism implied in spiritualistic practices.
This flux of things in constant instability and change is captured by Barrios’ creative process in a strategy that underlies all his work: appropriation. The readymade through which the wheel is turned in fluxes where things vanish, losing their “original” meaning and uniqueness to reconnect and renew themselves, invested of new nature and meaning.
Appropriation conceived in this way is part of his essential vision of art. The kind of readymade used by Barrios in the majority of his work not only involves works of art made by other artists but also object-images of culture. In his appropriation game, he brings up works by Duchamp apart from inserting in his works milestones and images from the history of art, including pop culture icons such as superheroes, characters, the style and other resources of comics, and even songs and poems.
It would be fair to say that the majority of his works function with multiple and simultaneous appropriations or, in the style of Duchamp, as reciprocal readymades, coming from the culture glimpsed by our times. In this way, his artistic work jumps over the frontier towards the expanded field of culture, in the life of collective images.
But this life of collective images is recreated and shared by Barrios in something beyond normal; something expressed and lived through the world of dreams. That oneiric world loved by poets, philosophers, magicians and occultists that takes place in the sleeping conscience. From the emulated dream, from fantasy, Barrios seeks to insert in the experiences of the society inside us, a critique, a self-knowledge of it. In his game of time shifting, he resorts to something similar to an archaic futurism, as a critique from the present, where the past houses the things to which society, in its causal flux, would be devoted to in the future.
The oneiric world reasserted in this revision is based on the relationship the artist establishes with the unknown, with the break in the sequence of time, with esotericism, and with the coexistence of all these factors in the material world, perceived by him as a world that houses, at the same time, other possible worlds.
The exhibition points out the strong presence of references to Marcel Duchamp’s work as a leitmotiv of Barrios’s work. The appropriation of Duchamp constantly done by Barrios operates as a contradiction: it is open to the games that Duchamp’s own work implies. The appropriation operation has been to question and push to the limit of provocation the notion and the values that the work of art has for society and for the artists themselves.
We could look at the relationship between Barrios and Duchamp as through a mirror that reflects his empathy he feels towards Duchamp, the artist and the thinker, and their shared interest for the areas of no knowledge and esotericism. Also there, the irony that Duchamp frequented so much would be reflected. With humor, Barrios likes to point out the fetishism of commerce, of collecting and of an art system that tends to consecrate, and trivialize at the same time, the works of art that invariably go through it.
>> Biographie von Álvaro Barrios
>> Biographie von María Belén Sáez de Ibarra
Weitere Informationen über die Ausstellung:
www.elmamm.org
Pressekontakt: Mauren Álvarez, Leiterin der Kommunikationsabteilung
mauren.alvarez(at)elmamm.org
Kuratorin: María Belén Sáez de Ibarra
Álvaro Barrios ist ein außergewöhnlicher Zeichner, einer der Pioniere der Konzeptkunst in Kolumbien und einer der wichtigsten kolumbianischen Künstler der letzten Jahrzehnte.
Álvaro Barrios:
La leyenda del sueño
26 de noviembre de 2014 -
15 de marzo de 2015
Serie Homenajes MAMM