Leaflet Works on show Press release
What is Pull the Thread?

This exhibition, entitled Mirror Image, considers works in the ARTIUM collection from the point of view of experimentation, the development of artistic languages and self-referential approaches over the course of the history of art. The notion of art for art's sake grew out of the aesthetics of idealism, which championed the autonomy of the world of ideas as a form of knowledge. Throughout the 20th century, from the early avant-garde movements to the present day, many artistic practices engaged in a direct dialogue with art by interacting with its history and language, underscoring its divorce from other educational, moral or utilitarian functions.

Jorge Oteiza's piece Homenaje a Velázquez (Tribute to Velázquez; 1957) opens this fascinating look at a complex interweaving of quotations, references, tributes and manifestos which, as you pull on one of the threads, reveal the continuing breaks and evolutions that art has undergone in the last hundred years. The seams in this fabric that give us a new appreciation of the striving for renewal in Spanish art during the Franco dictatorship stitch together experiments in material and gesture from which abstraction emerged as the principal tool of renovation. This path was regarded by many as a process in which art split away from the real world and became defined from a political standpoint but lacking in ideology. Though it was never entirely thus, strictly speaking, art for art's sake built a space of creative freedom at a time of tight social and cultural restraints. The artists featured in this exhibition put all their effort into their artistic language and the relevance of their medium, but at the same time they openly criticised and analysed the phenomenon of art and its impact on people's lives.

In this early period, the mechanisms of representation looked inwards, but from the 1970s onwards the perception and interpenetration of art and its context were the main field of inquiry. This project spotlights the work of artists who preserved the value of their language but who used it to point to the cracks in modern objectivity, adding layers of subjectivity and skin to their analysis. The crisis in discourses and values in the closing decades of the century resulted in a biting, critical consideration of the object, prompting all kinds of questions. What is it that makes something a work of art? What makes the person who produced it an artist? Above all, what is it that makes this effort meaningful? These and other reflections were explored, not without melancholy, through criticism but also parody and irony. Similarly, there were many artists who turned to art history. Killing one's father, in the Freudian sense, became a common attitude that combined adoration with head-on opposition to earlier approaches. The search for a solution to the crisis in postmodernity is in many instances reflected in eclecticism, in the quotation or appropriation and in the analysis of the codes employed up until this time. The dilemma of originality and authorship have become a central concern, pointing to the sociological aspects of the practice of art.

This exhibition leads us through familiar areas of art, giving us a feeling of déjà vu pervaded by a sense of both recognition and suspicion. Art looks inwards in order to theorise on its nature and to speculate on its mysteries, creating an archive of mechanisms and elements of creation. The display concludes with a number of pieces that examine the limits of this process, its institutions, agents and servants—bringing us to a halt in our immediate cultural context—which, because of their proximity to us, imbue this analysis with special signification.

With the support of:

Cooperation project
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