Encounters with the 30s

The catalogue is a tour through the 30s, addressing the issues about alliances and confrontations between art and power given in a period marked by a climate of political violence that ends with World War II. Factors like the appearance of important industrial innovations and technologies are accompanied by a current of eclecticism in the arts, echoing their own times and gathering the main concerns from a political, aesthetical and cultural point of view.

The exhibition suggests that the artistic production of this period - which was marked by both a growing climate of political violence and by the appearance of important technological innovations, especially in communications and transport - should not be conceived only as an inertial extension of the avant-gardes of the two preceding decades or in terms of its relationship, a particularly conflictive one, with the narratives of propaganda. The 1930s must be considered a time in which modernity is questioned and reformulated, a time that gave rise to ideas and objects that challenged the boundaries among disciplines, media and nations. Looking at the notion of encounter from a thematic perspective, the exhibition analyses how artistic creation was influenced by the symbolic and geographical displacements made, either voluntarily or by force, by the period´s artists. It tries to show how these displacements led to a rethinking of the aesthetic postulates inherited from the avant-gardes and also to discursive and narrative strategies that have survived to our days. At the same time, the exhibition puts forward a critical reflection on the use that these artists made of the mass media, while exploring the tensions and relationships they maintained with the contexts -political, cultural, institutional- in which they worked. Authors: Manuel Borja-Villel, Jordana Mendelson, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Paul Wood, James Oles, Janine Mileaf, Tyrus Miller, Robert S. Lubar, Jutta Vinzent, Romy Golan, Katarina Schorb, François Gentili y Marie Vacher, Rocío Robles Tardío, Belén García Jiménez, Karen Fiss, Josep Renau, Javier Pérez Segura, Juan José Lahuerta, Robin Adèle Greeley, Olga Alexeeva, Alicia Alted Vigil, Juan Manuel Bonet, Ángel Ossorio, Lori Cole and Delia Solomons