Works on show What is Pull the Thread?

The exhibition Visceral Soul is part of the Pull the Thread project, in which the ARTIUM Collection is being displayed around the museum. The main thesis of the project, which is organised into three exhibitions curated by staff at the museum, is that all the shows are based on a single key work in the collection, Jorge Oteiza's Homenaje a Velázquez (Tribute to Velázquez). The fact that this piece is capable of forming the starting point of these three exhibitions that each pull the thread and take different directions demonstrates its far-reaching impact.

One of the three exhibitions, Montage of Attractions, deals with the relationship between art and the world, the realms beyond, the social context. Another, Mirror Image, explores art's relationship with itself, the self-references in works to other works, to trends in art or discourses. The third, Visceral Soul, considers introspection, the eye turned inwards.

With these three shows, the circle of essential concerns that art speculates on is closed.

Visceral Soul, as its title indicates, is a metaphor for our own ability to muster arguments for survival in the whirlwind of life, our determination to carry on until the end.

There is nothing more natural for the human being than confirming his own objectuality and, above all, establishing an intense and ongoing dialogue between his present life and certain death, something that in other terms is called the philosophy of transcendence.

For this reason, Visceral Soul is based on the conviction that art is also a medium that enables creators and artists to express themselves in every possible way, their interest in themselves, fears, questions, introspective gazes, doubts, the desire for transcendence, the meaning of their simple presence in the world. All of this occupies a central place in what we term the discourses of art.

This show is, then, a consideration of this creative tendency. It springs from Oteiza's Homenaje a Velázquez (1958), in which the artist's own metaphysics is starkly evident in his demonstration of the three dimensions and a fourth inside the interior void. This is what we here term The Womb, the beginning of everything, from which emerges, by pulling the thread, a series of works that are interpreted in terms of birth and humans' acquisition of understanding and inner consciousness.

The exhibition, abounding in works of every kind, technique, style and generation, seeks to spin a thread by interpreting an account and re-examining with the public the various allusions to concepts directly related to the reflective poetics of the inner universe.

Consequently, after the opening, with the abovementioned reference to The Womb, it continues with The Leap, the acquisition of awareness, The Double, in which the other and difference appear, The Liquid, understood as the flow of life, Inside, which deals with sense and guts, The Relationship, in which the family and socialisation are given voice, The Head and Confusion, as the intimate links between mediatised gazes, and lastly The Question, which brings us to abstraction, the sign and transcendence.

With the support of:

Cooperation project
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