Gustav Metzger: Act or Perish / Darío Corbeira: Remain Silent or Lie / Ilan Manouach: Shapereader

Act or Perish. Gustav Metzger—a Retrospective
Curated by: Dobrila Denegri and Pontus Kyander

MUSAC is opening the first solo show in Spain devoted to the legendary artist and political activist Gustav Metzger (Nuremberg, Germany, 1926). Act or Perish is the first large-scale overview of an artistic oeuvre considered as one of the most important in the 20th century, and spans the period from the late 1940s until today. It includes a systematic insight into Metzger’s early years of political activism and his formative years as an artist. Showing the influence of environmental and political engagement on his artistic radicalization, it includes documentary material from the artist’s own newly rediscovered archives.

Moving swiftly during the 1950s from studies in sculpture and painting into what became the central themes of Gustav Metzger, Auto-Destructive and Auto-Creative Art, it connects these concepts to his engagement with political activism, above all with the movements for nuclear disarmament and environmental awareness. The title of the retrospective, Act or Perish, comes from a phrase coined for The Committee of 100, an anti nuclear arms organization formed under Lord Bertrand Russell, to which Gustav Metzger was a first informal secretary. Act or Perish points at the activist and political core of Gustav Metzger’s lifetime achievement, but also illuminates later developments, like his Historic Photographs (from the mid 1990s and on) and large scale installations like In Memoriam (2005).

Darío Corbeira: Remain Silent or Lie
Curated by: Montserrat Rodríguez Garzo

Remain Silent or Lie is the title of the exhibition project created expressly for MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León by the artist Darío Corbeira (Madrid, Spain 1948). The works on show span from the mid-70s to date, including four recent creations which will be seen in public for the very first time in this exhibition.

The title of the project is taken from a sentence in Jean Paul Sartre’s The Venetian Pariah. In his study, Sartre championed the work of Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto—the artist destined to bookend Renaissance painting—describing the decadent Venice of the second half of the 16th century as a city that maintained its habit of remaining silent or lying. The idea of remaining silent or lying suggests a certain parallel between 16th century Venice and the West today, posing a reflection that has rather more to do with ends—death and deaths as its paradigm—than with beginnings; more to do with in-between territories than with clearly-defined independent zones; more to do with secant and minimally intersected situations than with well-defined and obsoletely contained situations.


Ilan Manouach: Shapereader

Ilan Manouach. Shapereader is an exhibition conceived by the multi-disciplinar artist Ilan Manouach (Athens, Greece, 1980), whose interest is centered on conceptual comics. In Shapereader, he intends to extend the power of comics to an audience that was previously excluded: the blind. As such, he designed a unique system of symbols that designate characters, places, actions, emotions and other narrative elements, without recourse either to mimetic pictorialism or to written language.

Shapereader is a repertoire of forms and patterns with the goal to translate words and meanings into tactile formations. It was designed from scratch in order to allow the creation of universally accessible narrative works of tactile literature for, and from a visually impaired readership. Shapereader advocates for new publishing grounds and challenges the visual predominance of reading and storytelling experience. While it has been mainly created for the purposes of a blind community, the Shapereader repertoire can also be experienced by the acquainted regular user.