About Barcelona

Gil J Wolman. I am immortal and alive

Gil Joseph Wolman (1929–1995) was a French artist born in Paris, pioneer in researching the intersection and alteration of visual and textual languages. His work encompassed painting, poetry and film-making.
Wolman was an active agent provocateur from an early age.
He formed part with Isidore Isou of the avant garde Letterist movement in the early 1950s. The Lettrism was an artistic and intellectual movement. It maintained that the expressive heights of all artistic languages (poetry, music, painting, etc) had already been reached, and that a stagnant historical moment had arrived where anything produced was doomed to repetition or decadence. In order to initiate a new creative cycle, it was necessary, first and foremost, to go back to the beginnings, the deconstruction of artistic languages, meaning a return to signs emptied of their semantic weight, a return to letters.
In February 1952 Wolman was part of a major scandal, mounting a screening of five films, including his L'Anticoncept, the first of his experiments in "Cinematochrone". At the ends of 1952 Guy Debord founds the Lettrist International, a splitter movement. Debord and Wolman posited extending the Lettrist revolution to a criticism of social and political life, and to personal commitment with what they called ‘a sufficiently new way of living life itself’. After a few years, and for reasons never explained, Debord expelled Wolman from the movement. Following his exclusion, Wolman continued to develop his own work, and he re-established links with the original Letterist movement. In 1964, however, he split again from Isou's group, to establish the short-lived Second Letterist International.
The exhibition consists of four parts and due to the number of works, documents and publications included in it is a sort of history of the Lettrism.
The first part is the film L’Anticoncept, projected onto a weather balloon placed in front of the theatre’s curtain. The image comes on and off, with the black and the white alternating intermittently and with different rhythms, and the sound consists of poems, brief reflections and syncopated texts falsely sung.
The second part of the exhibition focuses on the period when Wolman with Debord and others separated from Isou’s group to form the Lettrist International (1952–57). During those years, Wolman and Debord wrote the manual Mode d’emploi du détournement. Détournement (detour) is the Lettrist technique of altering and undermining the meaning of deliberately plagiarised material.
The third part are the ‘Scotch art’ compositions (produced by means of a procedure that consists of tearing strips of printed paper and taping them to wood or canvas) that were shown at the Galerie Valérie Schmidt in 1964, 1966 and 1968.
The fourth and last section of the exhibition deals with the works related to the ‘separatist movement’ that Wolman created in 1977; he was the movement’s sole member. In search of simplicity (‘the more simple, the more beautiful,’ he used to say), he limited himself to splitting objects in two, without greater aesthetic concerns.
This monographic exhibition of Wolman’s work is the first ever held in Spain and consists of about 250 works and documents, from L’Anticoncept (1951) to Voir de mémoire (1995).
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) from June 4, 2010 till January 9, 2011.
 

Sonar 2010 Barcelona

The 17th International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art Sonar 2010 will take place, for the first time simultaneously in the cities of Barcelona and A Coruña (Sonar Galicia) coinciding with the Xacobeo (Compostela’s Jubilee). The Sonar Festival confirmed dates are 17, 18 and 19 June, and presents a line-up that will be, to a large extent, shared by the two cities. In both cities the Sonar’s diverse artistic offer will split between the Sonar by Day activities (in Barcelona, the CCCB and MACBA venues) with a music line-up, and a multimedia and audiovisual area and the Sonar by Night (in Barcelona in Fira Gran Via M2 L’Hospitalet) that will feature the latest leading lights in electronic, together with some simultaneous concerts in special venues. In the Sonar Festival you can enjoy a selected program which combines the electronica headliners together with emerging artists and DJ’s representing the most updated music and new media trends within electronic culture, and it is also the meeting point for a worldwide audience looking for the newest, and also for professionals, looking for the perfect environment for business and networking.

For information  visit Sonar Festival

Barcelona Design Week 2009

CAixa Forum, LLotja, MACBA, October 2009

For the 4th year organized by BCD, Barcelona Design Centre, will take place the BCN Design Week. This design week is an international business focused congress framed in the field of design and aimed at those companies and professionals in any industry or productive services that use knowledge and creativity as a driver of its business activity. This 2009 BCN Design Week has a special relevancy to the celebration of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. 
The various events and activities included within the BCN Design Week offer the attendees the opportunity to learn, share and delve into varied design related topics, in order to promote Barcelona as a city of creativity, design and knowledge, strengthening the relationship between business and design and fostering greater understanding and awareness of design and its strategic value.
From 26th to 30th of October, businesses of diverse productive or services sectors, professionals and experts of the world of design as well as prestigious speakers will give themselves appointment in a platform of experiences in which the main topics to be addressed are Design Thinking & Creativity, Design Management, Mobile Design or Creativity and family business, among other topics.
This year venues were the different activities will take place during the week are the CaixaForum and the Mies Van der Rohe Pavilion in the Montjuic Mountain,the Casa Llotja de Mar and the MACBA Museum.
More information through the officialBcn Desing Week website 

Universal Archive

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) - October 08 to January 09

The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia. The exhibition explores the role of photography as a notion of document in history, and it is organized into two main parts.
The first part poses some major discussions on the photographic paper in the modern period, roughly from 1850 to 1980. The second area, Public Spaces Photographic focuses on the documents of the exhibition spaces of El Lissitzky between 1928 and 1930. The third area explores the notion of photography as a tool for social sciences and for the creation of image files on historic projects.

At the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), co produced with Museu Colecçâo Berardo-Arte Moderna e Contemporânea, Lisboa,  directed by Bartomeu Marí  and curator Jorge Riblat, from 23 October to 6 January 09.  Photo Berenice Abbott "Pike and Henry Streets, Manhattan" 1936

Jorge Oteiza - La Ola

Jorge Oteiza Enbil, born at Orio, Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country, worked as painter, designer and writer, and became one of the main theorists on Basque modern art.
He started his career at the end of the twenties, with primitive works. Between 1935 and 1947 he takes up a great trip abroad to South America. Upon his return to Spain, he becomes the talk at all innovation-trend exhibitions and in public projects (Basilica de Aranzazu, 1950-1969) evidently featuring international projection: in fact, he was one of the winners in the IV Biennale exhibition of Sao Paulo, 1957. During that time he turned into geometry and many of his best works referred to such forms as cylinder, sphere and especially to cube, in his series of metaphysical boxes and crystals. It was at the end of that decade when it left the expressionism and the figuration to begin by the footpath of the abstraction, which took to him to the emptiness in the sculpture. Oteiza decided to leave the sculpture in 1959, convinced that no longer he was going to contribute with nothing new.
In 1962 he published Quosque tandem!, an essay about the aesthetics inherent to basque soul, based on Basque prehistoric art and Basque people's anthropological roots.
The sculpture La Ola, made in aluminum, is based on a small 1957 bronze work. It has an approximated weight of 3,500 kilos and was made in the factory of Pere Casanova in Mataró. Oteiza donated to the Macba Foundation the sculpture, but he could not be present on the unveiling because of his broken health.
He died in Donostia, Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country at the age of 94 years in 2003.

Francesc Torres. Da capo

MACBA Museum Barcelona - June to September

The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona dedicates this retrospective exhibition to the work of Francesc Torres. The tile of the exhibition “Da Capo” makes reference to a vision of the human condition related both to history and time, and which questions the nature of evolution.
Formed in the Escola Massana of Barcelona; in 1967 goes to Paris, where he attends classes in l'Ecole DES Beaux Arts and exerts of assistant of Piotr Kowalski, Polish sculptor and architect, that will exert remarkable influence over Torres. Moves to the United States in 1974 till first years of 2000, when he moves back to Barcelona.
Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) is the author of a very vast and varied body of work that fundamentally runs in opposition to the humanist vision of society. The exhibition includes a recompilation of Torres' works created from late 1960s up to the present day in which the influence of poetry –which the artist has developed through extensive written work over the years– can be appreciated, alongside his cultivation of artwork centred on the search for objectivity. Interested in the nature of the object, Torres has evolved toward an analysis of biological systems where the use of natural elements (water, air, earth, etc.) appears.
At the MACBA from June 6 to September 28. 

Alice Creischer: Works and Collaborations

MACBA - Barcelona - February to May 2008

The exhibition at MACBA will be structured around two of Alice Creischer’s most important recent works: L’atelier de la peintrice. Allégorie réelle déterminant una phase de sept années de ma vie artistique ("The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My Artistic Life"), produced in 2000. Secondly, her Apparat zum osmotischen Druckausgleich von Reichtum bei der Betrachtung von Armut (Apparatus for Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005) is an installation featuring sculptural elements attempting to reconstruct the artist’s own experience in a journey to India in 2004 where she saw situations of the most severe poverty. This exhibition has been carried out within the framework of Transform and with the support of the European Community. And will take place at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona from February 1st to May 5th.
Image from Apparatus for Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005

Joan Jonas -Transparencies in a Dark Room

MACBA - Barcelona - September 07 - January 08

Timelines: Transparencies in a Dark Room
This is the first retrospective exhibition in Spain of the work of Joan Jonas (New York, 1936), one of the pioneering artists in performance art, experimental film and video installation. The exhibition consists essentially of four installations that are representative of her career, together with a series of films, single-channel videos, drawings and photographs, that between them present a reading of her work that draws a connection between her practice of performance art and the origins of video installation as a genre.
The exhibition is organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and co-produced with the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève. To be seen in the theatre space of the MACBA Capella and the museum’s exhibition rooms from September 20 to January 7.