VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
Now yes yes, The IVAM demolishes its walls to celebrate with the Valencians that it turns thirty years in good shape. After some previous aperitifs, This is the exhibition with which our flagship of modern art commemorates the anniversary that well deserves a unpacking of the collection that shows muscle and brings out the least touched. According to the museum director, Jose Miguel Cortes, approximately the 40% of the works on display have never been seen or have been seen very rarely. Conceived with a clear narrative character, Troubled times seeks to interweave the historical background from the years 30 with the most everyday aspects of life, surpassing chronological and geographical limits, times and contexts. The exhibition is divided into six large areas in which we see the role that art adopted in the face of political events., social and economic of the moment: two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, the mass society, the emergence of feminisms and gender theory…
But let's go in parts. Out, At the entrance of the room the sculpture welcomes us Prometheus (1937) of Jacques Lipchitz which symbolizes the fight for freedom in a turbulent time that already reeked of totalitarianism. This sculpture is just a warning, what's inside is not a bed of roses. In the section Violence and powerthe first thing we see is Julio González, his expressionist sculpture of hands that transmit suffering and tension. To the right Faces, billboards in which Joana Hadjithomas y Khalil Joreige have crossed out the eyes – the main feature of any face – of the “martyrs” who disappeared during the Lebanon war; and work of Chronicle Team, that in Heartfield / Lissitzky They combine the faces of Heartfield fascism with war cartography of the Battle of the Ebro. In the section Hidden worlds art rebels against threats, dissatisfaction and traumatic events, and it is an instrument for artists to feel alive. Dario Villalba paid attention to the marginalized and Music He returned to the Dachau concentration camp where he was held to transfer feelings and memories to painting.. The result was asexual beings, without subjective dimension, because when there is suffering and pain, there is modesty and silence.
In the back room everything revolves around Marcel Duchamp, a key artist in history because he created a new way of making art that did not represent reality, but he took ownership of it. All the artists in this room are related to Duchamp in some way, either quoting it or creating ready-mades. Richard Hamilton, For example, built ready-mades full of irony like the titled teeth The critic laughs, y John Cage He painted canvases with seeds that changed appearance over time, that is to say, that the artist no longer did, but he left it to be done. In the years 60 artists begin to manipulate the image, decontextualizing it and giving it new meanings, like in Socialite of Andy Warhol y Jean-Michel Basquiat (It does not belong to the IVAM collection but the Reina Sofía has given it to them for five years), where protest elements of urban art and comics become protagonists underground like masks and graffiti.
The presence of women artists and non-normative bodies were pending issues in the IVAM collection that during the last stage they have tried to correct. and the proof is Dissident bodies, where a gender approach is made that represents AIDS, transvestism and kaleidoscopic bodies that break with what is imposed by the system. In The faggot pen, Jesus Martinez Oliva composes fragments of photographs of CIS men in feminine postures to show that the masculine and the feminine are cultural constructions; y Cindy Sherman disguises itself as countless characters and identities to criticize, among other things, the stereotypes that cinema constructs and reinforces about the feminine. Finally, Urban outskirts counts as, following May 68, public space became an alternative and subversive means of transmitting messages. We will see posters that wallpapered the streets of Paris during the French revolt and a new cartography of Valencia Rogelio López Cuenca with the uses and abuses of political power over urban space and the initiatives such as Save the Botànic or the Falles Populars i Combatives that have emerged to confront them. S.M.
