EXPANDED CULTURE
Dates: April 9, 2021 - May 8, 2022
Curators: Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes / Yolanda Torrubia Fernández
Coordinator: Javier Corro Olmo
Space: North Cloister
Ángeles Agrela · Alegría & Piñero · Ana Laura Aláez · Louise Bourgeois · Pablo Capitán del Río · Nuria Carrasco · Jacobo Castellano · Chto Delat · Pepe Espaliú · Andreas Fogarasi · Fuentesal & Arenillas · Cristina Iglesias · Julia Llerena · Regina de Miguel · Moreno & Grau · Reinhard Mucha · Aurèlia Muñoz · Daniel Palacios · Amalia Pica · Francesc Ruiz · Adolfo Schlosser · Leonor Serrano · Soledad Sevilla
In 1979 the American theoretician Rosalind Krauss published her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", in which she remarked that "over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture". She also wrote that, as a category, sculpture had been "kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything". Of course, beneath the entire process she was analysing lay the substrate that minimal and conceptual art had produced in a fairly radical way, and which therefore required a historical anchor to be fully understood and accepted.
This new exhibition of works from the CAAC collection is predicated on the same idea of expanded sculpture, a term that has practically been elevated to a genre in its own right and has blossomed over the last decade, especially among a new generation of artists from different backgrounds. Expanded sculpture has increasingly tended towards installation art, another genre which it strongly resembles; since the 1960s, installation has also been consistently expanding its field of action and basking in the approval of the contemporary art establishment.
At the same time, several factors were considered when selecting the works and designing the exhibition itinerary. For example, we wanted to achieve gender parity and show a considerable number of works that have entered our collection over the last decade, especially those acquired last year with the funds granted to offset the effects of the pandemic, as well as some of the most iconic pieces in our collection. But above all, we have tried to create an itinerary where visitors, almost without realizing it, pass from abstraction to figuration and from geometry to the body, creating a various intersectional points along the way that initiate dialogues about matters like the idea of the apparatus, the organic in relation to form and material, or identity and popular culture.
