Stone art: solidity and modernity?

Barcelona,

The ceramics, very close to the organic, of Miquel Barceló are followed by an exhibition dedicated to the presence of that material in 20th century sculpture; It is said, and it is true, that this era has meant for this discipline an extraordinary openness in terms of raw materials and formal features, and the emergence of all types of elements as possible components, including soft and ephemeral ones, but it is also that stone, to which since ancient times we have granted numerous social and symbolic values and which we have always considered synonymous with solidity and eternity, continued to be terrain to be tamed by fundamental figures such as Jean Arp, Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Chillida, Naum Gabo , Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi or Jorge Oteiza.

All of them are represented in the exhibition “Art in stone”, which we can visit until February 2 of next year and which remembers how, in the first decades of the last century, there were many sculptors who decided to carve it in such a way. directly without resorting to intermediaries: instead of first using clay and plaster, a common procedure in the past, and then having expert technicians be in charge of creating the final piece, these artists decided to become owners of the process, dispense with tests and generate their abstract, stone works by themselves.

The fact that his were not figurative works did not detract from his challenge: these creations implied a deep knowledge of this material, and the deciphering, by his own hand, of its meanings and potentialities. His starting point, physically, is the same as that of the old masters, but his conception of the sculptural object and its forms will be completely different: the very unexpected void takes center stage, converted into an element of volumetric composition, on the one hand. more of these structures; Furthermore, monumental projects will always take into account the space that surrounds them, be it interior or exterior, and will never again be isolated proposals, simply exempt.

In the middle of the century there was a gradual change in favor of flexibility: in the late fifties and sixties, both in Europe and in the United States, the aforementioned Hepworth, Moore, Arp, Gabo, Noguchi, Bourgeois, Chillida and Oteiza They decided to gain freedom and time to design their pieces by giving their technical materialization to professional carvers; Thus, they could also be less constrained when it came to sketching shapes and even selecting harder stones.

Stone art. Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera

This project has been curated by Penelope Curtis, a great expert in contemporary sculpture and former director of the Tate Britain in London and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, and there are nearly eighty works collected, belonging to both those historical figures, whose links and confluences They will be highlighted, as well as authors from later generations who used stone to explore new conceptual developments, such as Xavier Corberó, Stephen Cox, Luciano Fabro, Barry Flanagan, Cristina Iglesias, Anish Kapoor, Ettore Spalletti and Alison Wilding.

The montage is completed with photographs that Aglaia Konrad has taken in the Carrara quarries and, as is usual in La Pedrera exhibitions, with different activities in various Barcelona settings: conference days and the screening of a documentary on the ways of doing by Barbara Hepworth in the Casa Milà itself, a recital by Mahan Esfahani in the Foyer del Liceu, a concert by Júlia Colom in the Menorcan quarries of S’Hostal, a visit discussed around stone in the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya , the performance The Onyx Dance at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and a premiere by Raquel García-Tomás at the Palau de la Música Catalana.