Art historian and curator, Julia Robinson, put together this exhibition of “objects between ready-made and spectacle” in 2010 for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. In this six-minute video she attempts to clarify the early evolution of New Realism between 1957 and 1962, with special emphasis on the European contributors. Despite the apparent dispersion of the show’s content, it is a reflection of a period that concentrates different points of inflection and changes of paradigm, from the “end of painting” to the early use of ready-made and consumer market objects.
This 17-minute video was produced by the Reina Sofía Museum on the occasion of their master lectures in 2011. The protagonist is TJ Clark, British art historian, critic and theorist. Author of “Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica” (2013) and of “Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism” (1999), among other seminal studies, Clark discusses here the ideas that ushered in modernity (the secularization process, the loss of aura or disillusion with the world) and how these concepts live on or have been transformed over history, placing special emphasis on the collection of the Reina Sofía Museum. TJ Clark is a felicitous speaker with complex but clear ideas, clearly enunciated. This video of his talk is worthwhile despite the confusing Spanish voice over Clark’s speech in English. It helps to read the English subtitles. More…
Photo: Felipe Gabaldón–Barcelona artist, Soledad Sevilla, recreated inside the Palacio del Cristal del Retiro in Madrid her personal representation of the night sky, represented by the linguistic signs on her computer keys on large aluminum and polycarbonate plastic panels. “The main feature of the Crystal Palace,” says Sevilla, “is its changing light and the way it filters, and creates transparencies and projections. This is my space!” More…