Self-Organization

The Fundació Joan Miró presents Self-Organization, a genealogy of do-it-yourself artistic practices from the pioneers of the sixties to the present.

Curated by Catalan artist Antonio Ortega, the exhibition offers a historical overview of attitudes and positions based on self-organization in contemporary art. It presents a personal selection of artists whose work dynamic has taken a turn that allows them to appropriate and maintain control of their own narrative. Organized with the support of the Banco Sabadell Foundation, the show brings together sixty-three works by artists including Esther Ferrer, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sílvia Gubern Cesare Pietroiusti, Jiří Kovanda, Henk Peeters and François Curlet, among others.

The selection unfolds over four spaces that explore various aspects such as works grounded in a position of self-organization, examples of artists who naturalized self-organization practices, and the exploration of spontaneous gestures of empowerment and opposition to the art system by some artists in the course of the period in question. As well as paintings, sculpture, drawing, photography and video, the show includes four installations and interventions on which Adam Nankervis, Laura Porter, and Mariona Moncunill have worked in the actual exhibition space.

The documents in the exhibition include a comic in which Carla Fernández outlines the relationship between art and life in the work of Gustav Metzger, one of the precursors of self-organization as an artistic practice. There are also ten oil reproductions painted by Pere Llobera to illustrate the publication that accompanies the show.

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