“Turno de retort” is the title of an exhibition that includes a significant number of works from the Contemporary Art Collection, fundamentally those that are part of three historical moments, the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950s and the 1960s. and seventies or, what is the same, the avant-garde, abstraction and minimal and conceptual art, although there are works, the least, that exceed these time limits. The set of works in the Collection that are part of these three movements or “moments” shine with special brilliance and it is to them that a set of works by Spanish artists, all of them active today, now want to address themselves, proposing a kind of “replication”, questioning or, at least, responding to the guidelines that their elders addressed in their day.
“Turno de retort”, with its parliamentary resonances, proposes a dialogue that is born from a generational challenge to the echoes of the avant-garde that resonate today in the works of contemporary artists. “Turno de retort” wants to be a generic title that illuminates different readings of the Contemporary Art Collection in successive assemblies. The one that occupies us today is entitled “Construction/Composition” and has to do with the drastic transformations that germinal issues in all creation, such as the reflection around the plane, the shape, the volume or the space, have suffered and continue to suffer in our time. , in light of the advent of digital technology, of the “considerations of too much” of images, of the new relationships between container and content in the field of exhibition and of the new performativity of works of art. If previous readings of the collection weaved a relationship of “kinship” between the artists, what is proposed here, as has become customary in the museum’s latest program, is a relationship of consensus and dissent, of analogies and fractures that can offer new perspectives on art in our country yesterday and today.
The exhibition can be visited until May 22, 2022 at the Patio Herreriano Museum of Contemporary Art.