Candice Breitz
Rafael Doctor
Araceli Corbo
Fernando Sanchez Castillo
Kazuyo Sejima
Ryue Nishizawa
Tania Pardo
Agustin Perez Rubio
Kristine Guzman
Octavio Zaya
Clare E. Rojas
On show the architecture of the Japanese firm, SANAA; the review of Spanish history by Fernando Sanchez Castillo; the latest video installations of Candice Breitz; a selection of 20 books on photography by Rafael Doctor and Araceli Corbo and a drawing-based installation by Clare E. Rojas.
Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/ SANAA
Curator: Agusti'n Pe'rez Rubio
MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contempora'neo de Castilla y Leo'n is pleased to present
for the first time in Spain, a major exhibition that traces the artistic
trajectory of the Japanese team of architects, SANAA formed by Kazuyo Sejima
+ Ryue Nishizawa. Winners of the Golden Lion in the 9th Venice Biennial for
Architecture for the IVAM Extension Building (Valencia) and for the Kanazawa
Museum (Japan), they are one of the most prestigious firms on an
international level who, from the start of their careers in Japan up to
world-wide recognition at present, have known how to elaborate a whole new
dictum of aesthetic as well as engineering proposals, converting their
architecture into one of the most solid in the international scene.
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Down with Intelligence
Curator: Tania Pardo
Under the title Abajo la inteligencia (Down with Intelligence), Fernando
Sa'nchez Castillo presents a complex reflection on 20th-century Spanish
history, through a selection of sculptural, pictorial and audiovisual works.
Hosted by the MUSAC, the show offers insight into three aspects linking the
central ideas behind this artist’s work. First, the importance of statues
and monuments, such as the lions flanking the entrance to the Spanish
parliament, or referring to overthrown heroes; and elements from our
collective memory, such as the car in which former Spanish Prime Minister
Carrero Blanco was travelling when he was assassinated. Second, the need to
redraw history, hybridising the comic and journalistic illustrations used
prior to photography. And third, two videos, one of which, Rich Cat Dies of
Heart Attack in Chicago (screened at the 26th Biennial of Sao Paulo in
2004), shows people pushing the enormous head of a statue. Baraka, the
second video, produced specially for the occasion, muses on the history of
Spain itself and, more particularly, on the idea of destiny linked to power.
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Candice Breitz: Multiple Exposure
Curator: Octavio Zaya
The MUSAC presents a monographic exhibition of the work of Candice Breitz.
This survey of recent works made since 2000 will focus strongly on the
artist’s multi-channel video installations. Breitz’s work addresses the
complex relationship between culture and consumption, probing and dissecting
the rocky chasms between reality and fiction, experience and language,
identity and its representations. The exhibition’s curator Octavio Zaya
describes Breitz’s work as a practice that ‘isolates the found footage that
the artist often takes as her source, aggressively re-directing this footage
against its characteristically narrative and anesthetic functions." But
Breitz’s interventions are not simply critical attacks on the products of
mass entertainment: they also take seriously the significance that pop
culture acquires for those who consume it and use it.
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The world today: 20 books on photography
A Project of: Rafael Doctor and Araceli Corbo
MUSAC will show a selection of 20 books on photography published by the most
prestigious publishing houses in the world in the last five years. The
selection has been undertaken under the criteria of printing and bonding
quality selection of authors and images, but above all, considering the very
concept of the book within the most important publishing houses of art books
and photographic albums in the world. Worth mentioning are: Twin Palms,
Steidl, Hatje Cantz, Schimer/Mosel, Charta, etc. and books such as American
Prospects by Joel Sternfeld (published by DAP), A Storybook Life by
Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Anthony Goicolea (Twin Palms) or China by
Burtynski (Steidl).
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Sympathetic magic
Curator: Tania Pardo
The American artist Clare E. Rojas (Ohio, USA, 1976) is presenting an
individual exhibition for the first time in Spain, and in it she will be
turning to a drawing-based installation to show the world of iconography
behind American folk imagery, through her complex vision of ‘folk art’.
Animal anthropology, landscapes and the various characters: all emerge as
visual references to American folk culture and traditional lore. With no
straight narrative behind them, her drawings each offer a fragment of
unreality, an alternate world in which the women characters can escape from
contemporary realities. The result is a large composition of scenes that
form a kind of graphic novel telling of a complex, allegory-rich world. Her
appropriation of various folk images to address female social concerns is
directly related to the feminist tradition of the 1970s, and more
specifically to Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago.
Opening: 20 january 2007
MUSAC
Avda. de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 - Leon