Domènec / Oscar Masotta / Francesc Torres

Seeing art as a critical social space, away from hegemonic history, MACBA offers three exhibitions of a very different nature.

The exhibition Domènec. Not Here, Not Anywhere traces the development of this Catalan artist (Mataró, 1962) from the late 90s to the present, including new projects. Domènec’s research and critical essay stems from an awareness of the mistakes of the modern movement, which he materialises in the form of sculptures, installations, photographs, videos and interventions in the public space. His work is fundamentally about issues such as the distance between utopia and social reality; speculation on the public dimension of architecture and the ideological precepts that determine it; socio-historical mechanisms and how they are interfered with; and about what conditions memory and oblivion. Among the works exhibited at MACBA are Arquitectura Española, 1939–1975 (2014/2018), a catalogue of some of the public works built by Republican prisoners during the Franco regime, and Baladia Future City (2011–2015), that focuses on the Baladia City National Urban Training Center, popularly known as “Chicago,” a centre for military training located near the military base of Tze’elim, in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. Curated by: Teresa Grandas

The exhibition Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action explores the career of this controversial and provocative intellectual, a crucial figure in the modernisation of the Argentinean cultural scene from the 1950s to the seventies. Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930–Barcelona, 1979) synthesised his position within the conjunction consciousness and structure: “The philosophy of Marxism must be rediscovered and specified in the modern doctrines (or “sciences”) of languages, structures and the unconscious.” His passions and areas of intervention were polymorphic, multiple, mobile: from literature and political militancy to the artistic avant-garde, comics and psychoanalysis. Exiled in Barcelona from 1975, Masotta brought Lacanian psychoanalysis to Spain through many study groups and founded the Freudian Libraries in Barcelona and Galicia. He was also a pioneer in the recognition of the aesthetic condition of the comic, until then depreciated within cultural analysis, and the initiator of the “anti-happening,” a new genre capable of “fusing the revolutionary praxis with the aesthetic praxis.” Organised by MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico, the show at MACBA seeks to integrate the different constellations of readings and areas of influence articulated by Masotta into a common itinerary. It exhibits documentary material from different sources, together with his own artistic output and that of the artists he wrote about (Eduardo Costa, Raul Escari, Alberto Greco, Roberto Jacoby, Marta Minujín, Dalila Puzzovio, Rubén Santantonín and Charly Squirru). It further reveals the vitality of his legacy in contemporary art, in connection to the work of Gonzalo Elvira, Dora García, Guillermina Mongan and the collective Un Faulduo. Curated by: Ana Longoni

Finally, in Francesc Torres. The Hermetic Bell. Space for a Non-Transferable Anthropology, the artist has collected a number of objects that are key to his creative process in a newly created work, which he will donate to the Museum. Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) was a pioneer of multimedia installations at a time when Neo-Expressionism was the dominant trend. The exhibition at MACBA is the result of an experiment that has never been tried before, in which the artist and the Museum have set themselves the challenge of exhibiting a personal archive and turning it into an artistic installation by placing it within the exhibition space. The aim is to show to the public sediments of memory, those that trigger critical thinking, those objects that bear witness to the artist’s unique experiences and which constitute an anthropological document. Organised in nodes, like neurons interconnected by multiple synapses, the exhibition unfolds the concepts that make up the world behind the artist’s works and texts: history, memory mediated by the remnants of wars, toys and the learning tools of hegemonic cultures for educating each generation, to name but a few. Curated by: Antònia M. Perelló