Gravity. Ernesto Esposito Collection is both a presentation of a collection and the opportunity to take a critical look at international contemporary art since the fall of the World Trade Centre. Attractive from many different viewpoints, this is a unique collection that expresses the personality of the collector both culturally and emotionally. Among its more than 800 artworks the collection offers both glamour and spectacle as well as controversy and the questioning and analysis of a number of contemporary values we consider to be unshakable. A reflection of the ideological and technical concerns of contemporary society, the collection ranges from audiovisual installations, painting and sculpture, to music and projects that are extremely unlikely ever to see the light of day. It is of no wonder then that the collection should contain works dealing with eschatology, violence or sex, but also beauty and the building of structures for a new future.

The Italian haute couture footwear designer, Ernesto Esposito, has had close links with the art world since his youth. Even before he was twenty, the passion that led him to acquire his first work of art (a silkscreen print by Warhol) in just a few instalments, made him, under the guidance of the gallery owner Lucio Amelio, a connoisseur of contemporary art in Naples, the city of his birth. He met some of the most innovative artists who visited this Italian city in the seventies and eighties, and who became personal friends of the collector. This enthusiasm has led him recently to sell important artworks purchased during the initial stages of the collection in order to finance the acquisition of the work of young artists. All these factors make this a living collection, maintained on the basis of the affection, knowledge and devotion of the designer.

The title given to the exhibition, «Gravity». is ambivalent in nature. From the direct visualisation of the physical weight of objects (several of the artworks are suspended in complex installations) to subtle metaphors (the presentation of desire as the materialisation of the attraction between two masses or the real or faked gravity of a situation), all allude to the tension between two forces. The works themselves highlight the debate concerning the presence of contradictions in the artistic context: spectacle and banality exist face-to-face with transcendence, reflection and commitment, two apparently opposite directions that keep mankind (sense) in suspense.

The exhibition, with more than fifty artworks, keep our senses in a constant state of excitement through the accumulation of stimuli and the alternation of these two trends that on so many occasions merge into the superimposition of icons of good and evil. Freedom, beauty, reality, document and the representation of tragedy, coexist in the same space. A vulnerable optimism with just a touch of melancholy.

We have selected the Gravity top ten from the exhibition in ARTIUM so that you will be able to see how it is possible to perceive the Earth's gravity through some of the works in the Esposito Collection, and to confront the crudity of life or defend yourself from it by enjoying their more light-hearted and lightweight side. Gravity contains force, attraction and humour, colour, sophistication and a defiant challenge. The artists represented in this exhibition display the strongest ‘gravitative' spirit of the exhibition: a reflection on certain aspects of postmodernity and all its derivations. These are artists who immerse themselves in colour and form rather than artists who see themselves as visual sociological chroniclers. They draw their inspiration from the language of advertising, fashion and film to give us their vision—occasionally ironic, critical or bitter—of various aspects of 21st-century society.

Gravity. Ernesto Esposito Collection
North Gallery, from February 1 to May 18 Curator: Enrique Martínez Goikoetxea Exhibition catalogue, including an interview with Ernesto Esposito and texts by Enrique Martínez Goikoetxea and Laura Fernández Orgaz

Gravity is a production of ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz)