FONS AUDIO #9
Rita McBride
Rita McBride’s works explore the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and installation. She focuses on seemingly secondary urban elements and takes them out of their context, changing their scale, their materials and their relationship to the surrounding space.
Parking lots, bleachers, pipes, HVAC units, water towers and awnings are just some of the targets of McBride’s metaphorical transformations. After an initial moment of recognition and familiarity, viewers who confront her works go through an alienation phase that forces them to rethink their relationship to the actual exhibition event, and to question the meaning that we usually attribute to spaces and materials. Her use of materials such us raffia, Venetian glass, Carrara marble, bronze and canvas in connection with ordinary urban elements shows the inherent contradictions between mass production and craftsmanship, between high and low culture.
The architecture of modernity, industrial design and minimalist sculpture are three fundamental influences that we can trace through her work, and which McBride tackles with an analytical, critical spirit that is not without irony.
Isabel Bachs
Isabel Bachs, Head of Architecture at MACBA, talks about the beginnings of the architectural project for the Museum, its impact in urban and citizen terms, its stylistic features, and some of the most noteworthy exhibitions.
Bartomeu Marí, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Anne Pöhlmann and Rita McBride talk about the exhibition "Oferta pública / Public Tender".
Jordi Ferreiro
The artist and educator Jordi Ferreiro talks about other ways of interacting with the Museum and about his conversation with Rita McBride's exhibition.
Muntadas
The work of Antoni Muntadas is an exhaustive study of communication processes and their numerous implications for society.
Ibon Aranberri
The work of Ibon Aranberri (Itziar-Deba, Guipúzcoa, 1969) explores the connections between nature and culture, and draws attention to the ideological abuses of the land by those in power at any given time.
Pep Duran
Pep Duran addresses an active viewer-actor who is willing to walk through his works bestowing on them personal, non-transferible meanings. A passionate collector of objects, his artistic production is inextricably linked with the use of materials that are discarded or found in containers.