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Private view 8th Nov 2011 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
Volume! Works from the Collection of 'La Caixa' Foundation and Macba
09.11.2011 - 23.04.2012
Habitus (2007), 67 C-Type prints size 35 x 43 cm.
Volume! proposes an interpretation of the transition from the 20th to the 21st century based on a paradigm shift in the art in terms of materials, sensory aspects and programme. Questioning the clichés that identify the 80s with the supremacy of painting, the exhibition places the pre-eminence of sculpture and photography at the centre of change at the turn of the new century. Volume sees the turn of the century coincide with the consolidation of sound and the artist's own voice as the principal materials in art production today. Echoing the formal and material innovations introduced by the historic avant-gardes in the early 20th century, contemporary artistic practice has replaced the eye as the crucial sense to reinstate the hearing in a real and contingent body. Restored to his or her body, the spectator acquires a near-choreographic quality. The three-dimensional nature of the Euclidean volume (from classical physics) is replaced by the volume of sounds and voices. This change in material works profound changes on the perceptive system and on behaviour: based on the convention dominated by what is visual, we begin to narrate a multi-sensory history of art.
Curated by Bartomeu Marí
Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art - MACBA
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Private view 8th July 2011 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Cultured Nature
09.07.2011 - 31.07.2011
Greenhouse (2007), double channel HDV installation, sound, text. 23 min, looped.
The relationship between humans and nature has been a source of inspiration for many generations of artists. Organized around recently acquired works by Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács (photo), Zachary Formwalt and Xavier Ribas, Cultured Nature presents video, photography and sculpture expressing very different visions and representations of the artistic genre of landscape and the cultivation of nature.
Artist duo Broersen & Lukács plunge the viewer into a constructed romantic landscape, while Formwalt critically addresses the connection between picturesque city parks and press and media images. In his video installation, Xavier Ribas shows how food production has radically redefined the landscape of West Friesland.
Shown alongside these three acquisitions is a selection of works from the collection in which artists construct, analyze and idealize nature and landscape. Cultured Nature traces the development of this theme from the 1970s to the present day. Included are Gilbert & George (who often picture themselves against the backdrop of the English landscape), as well as Adam Bartos, Ania Bien, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long and Robert Smithson. A section of the exhibition also highlights contemporary photography by Wout Berger, Jitka Hanzlová, Torbjørn Rødland, Johannes Schwartz and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Cultured Nature is an associative selection of works from the collection that envision the inspiring, capricious, contradictory and playful relationship between nature and culture.
Curated by Hropsimé Visser
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Private view 16th Novembre 2010 at the Jerwood Space, London
This Must Be the Place
17.11.2010 - 12.12.2010
Nomads (2008), 35 pigment prints size 59 x 75.5 cm, Google Earth composite, text.
With projects from Dakar, Barcelona, Shanghai, Dresden, California and London, This Must Be the Place, part of the Jerwood Encounters series, highlights the importance of location for today’s photography. As art reinvents itself as a context for experimental documentary practices, David Campanyi has brought together an international range of artistsii making work in a variety of forms: digital slideshows, films, composites, artists’ books, installation, photographic sequences, image/text and imagery derived from the internet.
Whether surveying a city for its specific character, unearthing a hidden past, speculating on the future, or looking at the effects of globalization on particular sites, This Must Be the Place is a timely assessment of how we understand locality, and a suggestive indication of the place of photography in contemporary art.
Featuring works by: Camille Fallet, Mimi Mollica, Xavier Ribas, Eva Stenram, Lillian Wilkie, Tereza Zelenkova and David Campany.
Curated by David Campany
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Private view 17th September 2010 at the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo [CA2M], Madrid
Before Everything
18.09.2010 - 09.01.2011
MMDCCLXI A.V.C (2008) 3 C-Type prints size 121 x 155 cm each (triptych), text.
Before Everything is an attempt to delve into current artistic production from Spain. The exhibition, in which 56 artists will participate, will occupy the Center in its entirety. Undertaken by the exhibition’s curators Aimar Arriola and Manuela Moscoso, the selection does not set out to offer a totalizing vision of the here and now of Spanish art, but rather to confer an unprecedented level of visibility to productive modalities that have developed in specific locations in Spain; it will attend to the diversity of languages and ways of making art that have characterized the last 20 years. The recent change of decade offers an opportune moment to formulate an exploration of what’s to come and to take a look at the languages and ways of operating that have marked recent art.
Curated by: Aimar Arriola and Manuela Moscoso
Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo [CA2M]
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Private view 20th June 2010 at Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona
LC. Deferred Utopia
21.06.2009 - 05.09.2009
LC (2002-2003), 22 C-Type prints sizes 47x39 cm and 47x57 cm.
Xavier Ribas documented the state of La Catalana neighbourhood over the course of 2002 and 2003. Urban decay and the systematic abandonment of public services had turned the area into a semi-functioning ruin. The twenty-two photographs that form his LC series show a devastated territory in its death throes. The exhibition is accompanied by historical documentation, videos and maps.
Curated by Carles Guerra. Documentation: Carmen Cazalla
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Private view 9th June 2010 at the Museo de la Ciudad, Madrid
Profecías, un diálogo entre la fotografía española del siglo XIX y autores contemporáneos
11.06.2010 - 25.07.2010
Ceuta Border Fence (2009), 26 C-Type prints size 71 x 89 cm.
La exposición Profecías, un proyecto del Fondo Fotográfico de la Universidad de Navarra, es un diálogo entre el origen y el presente de la fotografía. La muestra incluye un centenar de fotografías del siglo XIX -obras maestras de la fotografía española-, y los desarrollos fotográficos de 13 autores contemporáneos que han creado nuevas obras a partir de una revisión de estas piezas.
Joan Fontcuberta, Roland Fischer, Bleda & Rosa, Lynne Cohen, Sergio Belinchón, Xavier Ribas, Jordi Bernadó, o Gabriele Basilíco son algunos de los autores que han construido su propio diálogo con la fotografía del siglo XIX, escogiendo para ello álbumes, autores o temas presentes en la colección histórica del Fondo Fotográfico, y subrayando en numerosas ocasiones el carácter profético o anticipador de los pioneros de la fotografía.
Curated by: Rafael Levenfeld and Valentín Vallhonrat
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Private view 7th October 2009 at Belfast Exposed. Belfast, Northern Ireland
Habitus
08.10.2009 - 24.11.2009
A solo exhibition by Catalan photographer Xavier Ribas, held jointly at Belfast Exposed and PLACE. The exhibition focuses on recent work presented in grid format and draws on Ribas’ longstanding interest in urban structure, archaeology and anthropology. The exhibition is presented in the context of Belfast Exposed’s ongoing examination of the city through archive and gallery projects, which explore social and political currents in ‘post conflict’ Belfast and the complex relationships between past and present, inscribed on public, private and commercial spaces.
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Private view 29th September 2009 at the Stanley Picker Gallery, London
Strange Places
30.09.2009 - 21.10.2009
Thresholds (2001-2002) 8 C-Type prints size 81 x 106 cm.
Strange Places brings together 11 international contemporary artists who propose an alternative mapping of the globalized urban condition. Whether gazing at ambiguous thresholds on the edges of the city, or tracing liminal spaces in its centre, these photographs explore themes of place, identity, boundaries and the uneasy encounter between land and built environment. The images do not capture urban life as action, but meditate on the spaces where it unfolds. What arises from this observation of traces and aftermath is a poetic quality hinting at the potential beauty of the most unlikely places.
Curated by Alexandra Stara
Stanley Picker Gallery, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Kingston University
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Private view 12th June 2009 at the George Eastman House, Rochester
Private view 9th September 2009 at the Aperture Gallery, New York
Nature As Artifice New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art
George Eastman House 13.06.2009 - 16.08.2009
Aperture Gallery 10.09.2009 - 29.10.2009
Greenhouse (2007) 2 channel HDV installation, sound, text. 23 min, looped
Nature As Artifice places a new image of the Dutch landscape over and against the old ̂‘DutchDuyt Dutch landscape that is familiar chiefly from 17th century Dutch painting. Nature As Artifice stimulates the formation of a new mental image of a landscape which has changed radically in its function over the last century, and has thus also altered in its appearance.
The Netherlands boasts excellent landscape photographers who have thoroughly and competently examined the landscape over the last three decades, visualising it in an inspired manner in photography (and an occasional video work). They have in common their interest in the changing ways that the Dutch shape and use their landscape, coupled with a new manner of photographing and filming. Nature As Artifice is the first survey of their work, in the form of an exhibition and a book, both the result of extensive research. This research was financed in part by a research grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).
Curated by Maartje van den Heuvel
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Private view 14th May 2009 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
Time as Matter. MACBA Collection. New acquisitions 22
15.05.2009 - 31.08.2009
Sundays (1994-1997)
The exhibition features a presentation of the priority lines of interest and research at the MACBA in this new stage, initiated in 2008. While over recent years the Collection has started to gather together documents that function as works of art (Grup de Treball, Tucumán Arde (Tucuman is Burning), works by collectives of artists and activists and so on), this has not implied forgoing the collection of great works by significant artists of our time. Alongside the abundance of fragments, it is important to consolidate nuclei of singular and complementary works that can express discourses on the nature of artistic creation and the historical moment in which we live. The MACBA is ideally placed to build a collection which explains the passing from the 20th to the 21st century, which begins with formulations of the final utopias of the last century and speaks of its crises, and then follows the present century, with its complexities and contradictions.
Curated by: Bartomeu Marí and Antònia Maria Perelló
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA]
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Private view 22nd October 2008 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia
23.10.2008 - 06.01.2009
Habitus (2007), 67 C-Type prints size 35 x 43 cm.
This exhibition analyses the idea of a document in the history of photography on the basis of the study and staging of a number of debates about the genre during the 20th century. With the aim of assessing various hypotheses about the meanings and mechanisms of the documentary, it traces a historical itinerary that gets under way with the beginning of the hegemony of photography in the illustrated press in the first third of the 20th century, before arriving at the purported crisis of photographic realism in the digital era at the end of the century. For all that, the exhibition is not a history of the genre, nor does it exhaust its possible definitions, but instead attempts to study how the photographic document has been constituted — in a consistently ambivalent and polemical way — in certain historical contexts.
Curated by Jorge Ribalta
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA]
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Private view 11th June 2008 at the Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo
Private view 21st October 2008 at the Neue Pinakhotek, München
Nature As Artifice New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art
Kröller Müller Museum 12.06.2008 - 28.09.2008
Neue Pinakhotek 21.10.2008 - 18.01.2009
Greenhouse (2007) 2 channel HDV installation, sound, text. 23 min, looped
Nature As Artifice places a new image of the Dutch landscape over and against the old ̂‘DutchDuyt Dutch landscape that is familiar chiefly from 17th century Dutch painting. Nature As Artifice stimulates the formation of a new mental image of a landscape which has changed radically in its function over the last century, and has thus also altered in its appearance.
The Netherlands boasts excellent landscape photographers who have thoroughly and competently examined the landscape over the last three decades, visualising it in an inspired manner in photography (and an occasional video work). They have in common their interest in the changing ways that the Dutch shape and use their landscape, coupled with a new manner of photographing and filming. Nature As Artifice is the first survey of their work, in the form of an exhibition and a book, both the result of extensive research. This research was financed in part by a research grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).
Curated by Maartje van den Heuvel
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Private view 22nd July 2008 at the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo [CGAC], Santiago de Compostela
La sombra de la historia
23.7.2008 - 05.10.2008
Mud (2006) 30 C-Type prints 50 x 60 cm.
No es la primera vez que nos topamos con el concepto de archivo y documento como espina dorsal de un proyecto expositivo, en tanto que referencian historia, memoria, pasado, consolidan presente y catapultan futuro. Aunque sí nos encontramos con una orquestación diferente siguiendo el discurso del propio proyecto de La Sombra de la historia. Los contextos que vienen, el proyecto que completa la trilogía (consecutiva en años desde 2006) del Proxecto-Edición que podemos ver en el Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo estos primeros meses del año. Se reflexiona también sobre la manipulación del archivo y la construcción de realidad, sobre la autoría, la veracidad y crédito totalitarista de imágenes que nuestro ojo obliga a nuestro cerebro a creer, el almacenamiento y la difusión de documentos, la edición de los mismos o el exceso no sólo cuantitativo, sino cualitativo.
Curated by Manuel Olveira
Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo [CGAC]
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Private view 9th May 2007 at the Fundació Espais, Girona
Paisajes invisibles/ Parajes imposibles
10.05.2007 - 23.06.2007
Invisible Structures (2006-2008) 19 C-Type prints size 120 x 155 cm.
Invisible is everything that is not perceptible through sight. Invisible also refers to what is imperceptible to our way of looking. Therefore a dual condition of invisibility emerges: that which has to do with sight, the physical incapacity to perceive some of the rays of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that which has to do with our way of looking, how our conceptual, cultural, psychological and personal baggage impedes us from seeing certain things. The works that make up this exhibition move between these two extremes.
Curated by Lluís Sabadell i Artiga
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Private view 1st November 2007 at the Lewis Gluckman Gallery, Cork
Beyond The Country. Perspectives of the Land in Historic and Contemporary Art
02.11.2007 - 02.03.2008
Mud (2006) 30 C-Type prints 50 x 60 cm.
How does landscape relate to land? Do they refer to the same thing? How can representations of the land or the countryside carry positive and/or negative implications? Juxtaposing 19th and early 20th century paintings with contemporary art, the exhibition Beyond the country examines different ideas of the land and presents new ways of approaching its visual codes.
Curated by René Zechlin and Matt Packer.
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