Son[i]a #140
Under the title ‘Volume! Works from the collections of “la Caixa” Foundation and MACBA’, MACBA presents the first in a series of major exhibitions jointly organised with ”la Caixa” Foundation with the purpose of different selections from amongst the 5,500 works in their combined collections.
‘Volume!’ proposes an interpretation of the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first Century based on a paradigm shift in art in terms of materials, sensory aspects and programming.
The exhibition questions the clichés that identify the twentieth century as the ‘century of the image’ and the 1980s with the supremacy of painting. Instead, the exhibition places the pre-eminence of sculpture and photography at the centre of change at the turn of the present century, by rejecting and surpassing the Minimalist principIes that had dominated sculpture until the seventies, and, in the case of photography, by going beyond the concept of the document in favour of a new aesthetic dimension.
‘Volume!’ identifies the turn of the century as the moment of consolidation of sound and voice as materials for artistic production. The new model is rooted in experimental video and cinema works that favour a narrative language that gradually frees itself from the image.
Son[i]a talks Bartomeu Marí, curator of the exhibition, and Ninfa Bisbe, director of ”la Caixa” Foundation Contemporary Art Collection.