ARTIUM, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, presents the chamber exhibition “CVA. Juan Luis Moraza and Marisa Fernández” (North Gallery, until January 9), which is included within the exhibition “The Collection in Context” as an example of the transformation that took place in the art of the Basque Country in the early eighties. CVA was a group formed by the artists Juan Luis Moraza and Marisa Fernandez, which was extremely active during the period 1979-1985 and had a great deal of influence on the artists who subsequently developed their own, highly interesting artistic careers. Based on a reflection upon the limits and codes of the representation of art, their work is full of frames and pedestals, aproduct of the radical reduction of the artistic object to its boundaries. Through the publication of a catalogue and by compiling the small number of documents available, this retrospective exhibition also fills the documentary vacuum with respect to this "artistic company" (as the artists themselves called their group), due to the meagre artistic infrastructures of that time.

One of the programmes that ARTIUM has consolidated since this Museum began to organise exhibitions is the so-called Chamber Exhibition which, over the last three years, has provided in-depth examinations of some of the works in the collection through their contextualisation in exhibitions and publications that include other works from the same period and documentation. The exhibitions of Rafael Zabaleta and Nicolás de Lekuona were also organised within the same programme.

Nevertheless, on this occasion with the exhibitions and publications of CVA (1980/1984), in the North Gallery of ARTIUM, between October 27 and in January 9, our aim is to recover the work of a group which was active for a relatively short time in the past. We must bear in mind that towards the end of the seventies and in the early eighties, there were not many opportunities for disseminating through catalogues the work of many artists who are now considered to have had a major influence. The precariousness which that period imposed on information and documentation channels meant that our knowledge of that period is incomplete and biased by what happened at that time.

CVA was a company formed by two artists, Maria Luisa Fernández (Villarejo de Orbigo, Leon, 1955) and Juan Luis Moraza (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Alava, 1960), who worked from 1979 until 1985, although the exhibition includes works from between 1980 and 1984, perhaps their best-known and fertile period. These artists burst upon the art scene of the period when they were still studying at the Fine Arts Faculty in Bilbao and had an enormous impact both through their artistic proposals and the enormous influence they exercised on the convulsive panorama of Basque and, to a certain extent, of Spanish art.

Their proposals managed to provide other ways of looking at the problems of representation of artistic phenomena. They reduced the artistic object efficiently and completely to its limits: The frame and the pedestal, which became metaphors of art itself, revealed both its paradoxes and its limits. Gold also became a dual symbol of art: of brilliance, brightness and value, of added value. It appears in most of their works, which thus became an ironic examination of the world of art.

We should bear in mind that in addition to the objects themselves, CVA was a company/group that reflected intensely upon the representation of art, and this is shown in a number of different texts and incomplete projects, but which give an accurate idea of the amplitude of their creative interests.

CVA belongs to the tradition of the postures formulated by the Surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, Conceptual Art and Minimalism, and also played a key role in the transformation in Spanish and Western art: what has been called the end of modernity and the beginning of post-modernity.

In fact, this exhibition has been arranged very close to the exhibition "The Collection in Context" which is presented at the time as the CTA exhibition and which sets out the main themes of the art of that time. In this sense, CVA has invaded and has been invaded symbolically with the construction of a window or, rather, of the frame of a window, from which one can get a view of the other exhibition.

This exhibition contains approximately one hundred works of art including objects, documentation and projects, the most important of which is the large installation “(P) Punto de vista” of 1982.

With this exhibition and the publication of a precise catalogue of their work, ARTIUM is contributing to a study and of the work of CVA, an essential group in the art of our immediate past, the long-awaited wish of a large part of the art world, and to its dissemination among the general public.