ARTIUM, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition "The Collection being Context. 1973-1985” (North Gallery, until January 9), a retrospective look at the years that saw a radical transformation in Spanish art and the emergence of new figures and structures. Coinciding with the transition to democracy, the change on the artistic scene was not, however, so much a transformation as a rupture, parallel to similar movements throughout Europe, also accompanied by social and political changes The exhibition produced by ARTIUM and curated by its Permanent Collection Department, documents this period with 60 works by some of the artists who took a leading part at the end of one epoch and the beginning of another in Spanish art.

One of the main debates that define museums and art centres today, is perspective-immediacy. Today, the work of interpreting and disseminating contemporary art is usually based on what is immediate, what is nearest to us. That is acceptable, but, nevertheless, there is a risk of abandoning oneself to the passage of time and of exhibiting dreamy, partial or erroneous visions of past events that, in the end, will be the ones that provide us with the just measure of our time.

For the last 29 years, first in the Fine Arts Museum of Alava and since 2002 in ARTIUM, an extensive collection of works of art has been put together, a testimony to one hundred years of modern and contemporary art in Spain. It could be said that this collection has witnessed all the vicissitudes of Spanish society, all its ups and downs, but we do not refer only to cultural events but to everything that has made us what we are today. Therefore, the collection provides is with the necessary clues to understand events that have left such a deep impression on our society.

It should be emphasised that the process of putting together and structuring this depository of our artistic heritage, which is the ARTIUM collection, has been affected by the same events experienced by society itself, still more so in Spain, where, from the seventies to the mid eighties, a radical change took place, which in historical terms has been called the transition.

As a result of this, in the late seventies, Spanish art underwent a fundamental transformation in its forms and structure in such a way that as of 1980 we can already speak of a totally different era to the previous one. This rupture was so far-reaching and quick that even at that time people began to talk about the "boom" in Spanish art. Everything changed. Hundreds of artists came to the fore, dozens of galleries were opened, institutional collections were begun, contemporary art centres and museums were designed, ARCO was created, paradigm of the new media power of art in this country. In short, we were presented with a panorama which, as a first consequence, was described as a parallel diversion from the Spanish political and social transition. Everything pointed to this and we still use this definition today.

However, is it possible to understand this metamorphosis of Spanish art only in terms of the local context? Wasn't something similar happening in the rest of the Western world at that exact moment in time, with the transmutation of the notion of modernity into post-modernity? Were we affected by what had affected Western at? Didn't developed and democratic societies also suffer the kind of socio-political transition that began with the oil crisis in 1973 and ended with the disappearance of the block system and its transformation into a post-industrial society?

We think so and this exhibition tries to examine this period from the aforementioned viewpoint. We are not going to deny that the change in Spain gave many artists an optimistic coat of varnish, in contrast to the cynical, dramatic and tortured ambience of other societies such as in Italy and Germany, following the loss of innocence that came with the end of modernity. The art system, as an accurate reflection of our time, rose again like the Phoenix, was restructured throughout, while art was deconstructed. After the sensation of fleetingness that conceptual art had installed on the creative scene in the sixties and seventies, as of 1980 there arose the need to objectualise once again and painting, sculpture reappeared and later on, new forms of creation emerged on the scene, in an eclectic review both in its form and in its discourse.

In Spain we had our own epiphany with the Pamplona Conferences held in 1972. This represented a major interdisciplinary meeting of artists of the latest avant-garde movements. This is the prologue to the exhibition. These Conferences were the first opportunity for the majority of the most important international artists of that time to meet, and also represented an enormous shock for the new generation of Spanish artists. At these Conferences there was virtually a total absence of the artists who had consolidated their careers in the fifties and sixties, the members of avant-garde groups and many of their followers. Art in the Basque Country would also represent a substantial change, although this was tinged by the enormous influence that the writings of Oteiza had exercised in the search for an individual identity, highly conditioned by the particular political ups and downs of the Basque Country.

Fifteen years later, in 1987, the epilogue on the exhibition, the art scene was radically different. The artists that had taken part in these changes from the beginning were joined by others. Manners changed and this period marked the sudden death of an era, the birth of another world, its zenith and the beginning of disillusionment.

This exhibition not only speaks of the art of those two decades but, especially, of what happened in the years that marked the end of one decade and the beginning of another.

Accordingly, the exhibition has been divided into three large spaces: the first examines the years between 1972 and 1975, the year in which Franco died. The second covers the period between 1976 and 1982, when the Kassel Documenta was held, including the first exhibition of work by young Spanish artists, and in Spain, under the slogan "For the change", the elections were won by the left. The third period covers the years between 1983 and 1987, the date on which the first symptoms of a certain social, cultural and political tiredness were detected.

The collection which is managed by ARTIUM is the perfect witness of this process and this exhibition contains a selection of the Museum's own works, including some key works of art in many of the events described above.

This examination is complemented with a contextual space that details the background against which these events took place. In it, one can visualise, read and listen to some of the essential milestones of that time, documentaries, films, catalogues, music and the graphical presence of other works from the collection that correspond to the period and which represent a total of 400 works of art of which the North Gallery shows only a small part.