COLLECTION XVI. SCALE

CURATED BY MANUEL SEGADE

Since museums first came into existence back in the eighteenth century, there has been a tradition of exhibiting that consists in showing sculptures in central courtyards and lobbies, allowing various fragments from the history of art to coexist in the same space, as part of a stage setting designed to be viewed by a comparative gaze.
 

Last December CA2M opened a large new space with natural light which enables it, for the first time, to exhibit the large-format works in the museum’s collection. Furthering our institution’s ongoing exploration into ways of exhibiting artwork and the language of museums, we have installed a sculpture hall that follows in the footsteps of museum convention, but with contemporary works from two distinct moments in recent decades: the tradition of international minimal and conceptual art in the seventies and its developments, based on new British sculpture, in the so-called New Spanish Sculpture from the eighties.
 

Both a walkthrough among the works in the exhibition on the first floor as well as a bird’s eye view from the runway on the upper floor give rise to a phenomenological experience in which the displacement of the spectator and a consciousness of her/his body bring into play the two basic terms of critique for a proper understanding of sculpture in the seventies and eighties, namely, absorption and theatricality.
 

Artists: Carl Andre, Txomin Badiola, Anthony Caro, Pello Irazu, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Ángeles Marco, Mario Merz, Juan Muñoz, Miquel Navarro, Ulrich Rückriem, Susana Solano.