ART AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
24 JUNE, 201731 JANUARY, 2018 GALLERY 1 Curator: Benjamin Weil
Fundación Botín acquired the majority of the artworks on display in this exhibition in the early years of the present century. The show affords visitors an overview of the work undertaken by Fundación Botín in the realm of the visual arts in the last twenty-five years or so. This selection includes artworks by recognised contemporary masters who have taught at the Santander Visual Arts Workshop at Villa Iris over the last twenty years, as well as pieces by a number of artists who have benefited from the programme of Visual Arts Scholarships which the foundation has been running since 1993, and who have since gone on to greater things. And so, works by artists of the stature of Miroslaw Balka, Tacita Dean, Carlos Garaicoa, Mona Hatoum, Antoni Muntadas and Juan Uslé are on display on the first floor exhibition hall alongside works by Lara Almarcegui, Carlos Bunga, Sandra Gamarra, Renata Lucas, Wilfredo Prieto and Fernando Sánchez Castillo, among others.
Carlos Bunga. Attempt to preserve, 2014
The overall set of works on show is highly diverse, both in terms of supports and media: photography, installation, sculpture, video, drawing and so on, as well as in the diversity of their conceptual focus. The selection wishes to provide a perspective on the current state of artistic practice, both in terms of its form and content; to reflect upon how classic art forms have evolved, how new narratives have been unfolding, and how contemporary artists address a cultural context that is informed by both local and global circumstances.
All the selected works ponder the complexity of a world characterized by large mutations, social instability, conflicts and tensions of all kinds, as well as the acceleration of time. This affects the way one may perceive a reality that tends to be increasingly fragmented, as fact and fiction mingle in an ever more intricate fashion. Art and the exhibition space remain as one of the few bastions of slowed-down time, one made for observation and contemplation, which, in turn, fosters critical thinking and comprehension.