A body without limits
dal 25/10/2007 al 26/1/2008
Segnalato da
Aristide Maillol
Egon Schiele
Otto Dix
Henri Matisse
Pablo Picasso
Joan Miro'
Marcel Duchamp
Marc Chagall
Henry Moore
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Michael Basquiat
Antoni Tapies
Antonio Saura
Willem de Kooning
Francis Bacon
Lucian Freud
25/10/2007
A body without limits
Fundacio Joan Miro', Barcelona
Aim of the exhibition is to help us to understand the changes in the portrayal of the human body that took place in the 20th century, a period in which the human figure ceased to be solely a portrait or a symbol of beauty and became a vehicle for expressing emotions. The show contains over 80 paintings and sculptures produced between 1900 and 2000 by 41 artists from all the main avant-garde movements: Maillol, Schiele, Dix, Matisse, Picasso, Miro', Duchamp, Chagall, Moore, Dubuffet, Basquiat, Fischl, Tapies and Saura, among others.
Group show
The Joan Miró Foundation is presenting “A body without limits”, a major exhibition sponsored by BBVA and curated by the art historian Jean-Louis Prat. Its aim is to help us to understand the changes in the portrayal of the human body that took place in the twentieth century, a period in which the human figure ceased to be solely a portrait or a symbol of beauty and became a vehicle for expressing emotions.
The show contains over 80 paintings and sculptures produced between 1900 and 2000 by 41 artists from all the main avant-garde movements:Maillol, Schiele, Dix, Matisse, Picasso, Miró, Duchamp, Chagall, Moore, Dubuffet, Basquiat, Fischl, Tàpies and Saura, among others.
The works are arranged in such a way as to demonstrate by confrontation, juxtaposition or contrast the wealth of the artistic languages used in the last century as well as the individual contributions of each of the artists.
In 1863, Manet’s Olympia forged a new path in the representation of the human figure in art, with the sitter depicted as a contemporary of the artist and unashamedly displaying her body to the viewer.It is a real nude body, not an academic study; an anonymous body that is a forthright expression of modernity, rather than a representation of ancient divinities.
From that moment on, the nude ceased to be idealised and began to be shown for what it is.Beauty was no longer linked to formalism, and the new canons permitted all manner of aesthetic revolutions and a new sense of freedom of creation and expression.
This trend became firmly established, and it was the variations in the way of representing the body that were to mark the changes of style.The Expressionists, for instance, painted a tormented body; the Cubists included aspects of primitive art; the Surrealists emphasised the eroticism of the nude;and after the Second World Warthe tormented body returned with artists such as De Kooning, Bacon and Freud.
“A body without limits” takes the viewer on a tour of twentieth-century art, in a review of the past that offers visions of the human body that never fail to surprise.
Fundacio Joan Miro'
Parc de Montjuic, s/n - Barcelona