Son[i]a #63
Francesc Torres
Da capo (06/06/2008-28/09/2008) is the second retrospective to be organised in Spain on the work of Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948), an artist who has spent most of his career in France, the US and Germany and is thus relatively unknown in his home country.
Working from the perspective of an artist and a citizen who critically reflects on the relationships between culture and politics, memory and history, the individual and the group, Torres’ work reveals the continuity of avant-garde tendencies in the eighties and nineties.
As well as showing the work that Torres has become known for, such as instalador, the exhibition currently at the MACBA also features his less familiar use of other languages, in particular drawing and painting, which arise from his interest in images and a desire to conciliate form and content. The retrospective format allows visitors to see the evolution of this aspect of his work that he began in the sixties and continues to this day.
Francesc Abad
Francesc Abad takes us on a tour spanning the last four decades of Spanish and Catalan art, through an analysis of his works in the MACBA Collection.
Oriol Vilanova
Oriol Vilanova works with materials from flea markets: postcards, books and other documents which he collects, sorts and recomposes to create new mental journeys.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Francesc Torres that we were unable to include the first time around.
Francesc Torres
Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) is an artist, essayist, poet, collector, and curator, who has been involved with conceptual art since the late sixties. He has been a pioneering figure in the use of installation as an artistic and narrative device with which to explore the possibilities of the exhibition space, the artistic object, and the interactions that take place between the audience and the art work. Historical memory, understood as a political category, is an another element that runs through his work. In FONS AUDIO #37 Francesc Torres talks about some of his works in the MACBA Collection as he looks back over his years in Paris working with Piotr Kowalski and his early performances in the United States. He also reflects on the aesthetic-political characteristics of installations, on historical memory, collecting, and the role of museums.