Mechanical and Technical Imaginaries in the IVAM Collection
For centuries the development of art was understood as homogeneous and accumulative progress, judged by a single scale of values and driven by the search for beauty, a concept that varied depending on the social and ideological rules in force at any given historical moment. From the nineteenth century onwards, with the consolidation of the industrial era, the art world changed completely, becoming more refracted and contingent on technological advances. Art would never again be contained with one single frame of influence; on the contrary, it began to include new ways of thinking, conceiving and executing analogous to those from the field of engineering. Luddism, Taylorism, the production line, streamlined aerodynamic forms, movement and speed, industrial buildings, machinery, tools and so on became sublime references which provided scope for the new demands and conditions of an art that abandoned faithful imitation and adopted aesthetically, sociologically and conceptually inflected functions.
Mechanical and Technological Imaginaries brings together work by artists in the IVAM collection concerned not just with the design and construction of mechanisms, but also in creating imaginaries that capture the spirit of the industrial and scientific culture that surrounded them, such as Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Laszo Peri, Man Ray, Stefan Themerson, Moholy Nagy, Boris Ignatovich, Germaine Krull and Gustav Klucis. At the same time, the show will also feature works by 鈥渧isionary technologists鈥� like Gilberto Zorio or by those who used materials and techniques borrowed from industrial manufacturing in order to reflect on the spirit, time, the body and the memory as is the case of Maribel Domenech or Gary Hill. It will also include artists who defend the coupling of art and science such as Yturralde, Alfaro, Sempere, Jos茅 Luis Alexanco, Elena Asins and Soledad Sevilla or conceptual narrators who, like Thomas Ruff, investigate into the perception of images through photography, using mechanical iconography as a core theme.
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For centuries the development of art was understood as homogeneous and accumulative progress, judged by a single scale of values and driven by the search for beauty, a concept that varied depending on the social and ideological rules in force at any given historical moment. From the nineteenth century onwards, with the consolidation of the industrial era, the art world changed completely, becoming more refracted and contingent on technological advances. Art would never again be contained with one single frame of influence; on the contrary, it began to include new ways of thinking, conceiving and executing analogous to those from the field of engineering. Luddism, Taylorism, the production line, streamlined aerodynamic forms, movement and speed, industrial buildings, machinery, tools and so on became sublime references which provided scope for the new demands and conditions of an art that abandoned faithful imitation and adopted aesthetically, sociologically and conceptually inflected functions.
Mechanical and Technological Imaginaries brings together work by artists in the IVAM collection concerned not just with the design and construction of mechanisms, but also in creating imaginaries that capture the spirit of the industrial and scientific culture that surrounded them, such as Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Laszo Peri, Man Ray, Stefan Themerson, Moholy Nagy, Boris Ignatovich, Germaine Krull and Gustav Klucis. At the same time, the show will also feature works by 鈥渧isionary technologists鈥� like Gilberto Zorio or by those who used materials and techniques borrowed from industrial manufacturing in order to reflect on the spirit, time, the body and the memory as is the case of Maribel Domenech or Gary Hill. It will also include artists who defend the coupling of art and science such as Yturralde, Alfaro, Sempere, Jos茅 Luis Alexanco, Elena Asins and Soledad Sevilla or conceptual narrators who, like Thomas Ruff, investigate into the perception of images through photography, using mechanical iconography as a core theme.
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