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Murals for a White Cube

Ana Bidart & Primal, Antonio Bravo, Iván Krassoievitch, Lucía Vidales

05 Marzo de 2020 - 14 Junio de 2020

Espacio de exhibición: Fachada, patio de murales, cubo y galería

Curaduría: Willy Kautz and Adriana Melchor

The white cube is one of the exhibition formats that since the first decades of the twentieth century became a standard to show works of art. It was a clean and apparently neutral space: four walls where objects were placed for their contemplation. With this way of exhibiting art in mind, David Alfaro Siqueiros theoretically and practically developed the notion of the plastic box: a pictorial environment with a social function, created for a moving spectator.

 

Based on four commissioned pieces by artists Ana Bidart and Primal, Antonio Bravo, Iván Krassoievitch and Lucía Vidales, this exhibition seeks to point at the tensions between the white cube and the plastic box. These projects look into various aspects of Siqueiros’ intellectual legacy: the suggestions about integral plastic arts, the social and pedagogical functions of murals, social revolts, the manifesto, and the relation between art and politics.

Ana Bidart and Primal have intervened the façade of the building with a collective mural that investigates the temporality of painting in the public space, the concept of chance, the current artistic practice and mediation devices regarding works of art. Through a revision of programmatic texts written by Siqueiros, Iván Krassoievitch refers to works on paper taking anachronism as a starting point, from which he suggests pictorial readings for an (anti)mural set in a vacuum. With this work, he suggests updating the idea of the spectator and a work in movement.

 

Antonio Bravo presents the viewer with a barricade at the entrance of the museum; made with limestone, its carved reliefs result from strategies focused on the erasure of images sourced from personal archives, and from the documental archive at the Siqueiros Center for Investigation and Documentation. These representations allow us to reflect about social revolts, choreo-politics and the social struggle. While Lucía Vidales explores and subverts, by way of a transportable mural, the theme of the crucifixion, taken on by Siqueiros as a strategy to encrypt political commentary.

In the second floor gallery projects are contextualized and integrated through a selection of archival material, as well as works coming from the foundational collection of the Siqueiros Project.

 

Ana Bidart y Primal

JOGO, Cómo se juega un mural

 

Antonio Bravo

La humanidad marcha

 

Iván Krassoievitch

Todos los tiempos presentes

 

Lucía Vidales

Viendo el monte Calvario

 

David Alfaro Siqueiros

Cristo del pueblo, 1963

Colección Proyecto Siqueiros - INBAL


Willy Kautz and Adriana Melchor

-Curators-