Little Stories, Great Women
Series stories jointly organized by nine museums for International Women’s Day
- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- David Bestué, in collaboration with Martina Millà
The Point of Sculpture offers an overview of the practice of modern and contemporary sculpture from an asynchronous, heterogeneous perspective that also includes older pieces and anonymous objects. The exhibition, arising from the ambition of twentieth-century sculpture to move beyond representing and generating images, also aims to show the major transformation of this discipline in the twenty-first century with the implementation of new techniques and the emergence of new imaginaries and sensibilities.
The exhibition illustrates how sculpture has held a tense dialogue with reality over the course of its history, capturing objects, bodies and narratives, and how it continues to have ties to the earliest expressions of the urge to sculpt. Accordingly, close to one hundred pieces selected by David Bestué are presented in seven spaces and address issues such as the copy and representation of reality, experimentation with materials, the exploration of the physical properties of sculpture, the relationship between the object and the subject, the relationship of sculpture with time, as well as the representation of the human figure and the expression of complex emotions such as sexual desire.
The show begins with the time prior to modernity, but focuses primarily on the period spanning from the early twentieth century until today, featuring artists such as Antoni Gaudí, Julio González, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Apel·les Fenosa, Lygia Clark, On Kawara, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, David Medalla, Eva Lootz, Susana Solano, Pipilotti Rist and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others.
The Spanish title of the exhibition, El sentido de la escultura, evolved from the essays by the Peruvian poet and linguist Mario Montalbetti in which he defends the concept of 'sentido' literally, as a notion closer to the expression of a direction than to the honing down of a meaning.
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The Point of Sculpture Catalogue
Over the course of seven chapters, Bestué reveals how sculpture has undergone a major transformation in the twenty-first century thanks to the use of new techniques and the emergence of new imaginaries. With essays by Aimar Arriola, Jane Bennett, Mario Carpo, Maite Garbayo, Martina Millà, Ester Pino, Susana Solano and Julia Spínola.
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