As part of its 50th anniversary, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá opens with the exhibition From Modernity to Contemporaneity a series of five curatorial projects that approach its collection from different angles.
As part of its 50th anniversary, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá opens with the exhibition From Modernity to Contemporaneity a series of five curatorial projects that approach its collection from different angles.
From Modernity to Contemporaneity offers a look through the MAC’s collection with works by renowned artists such as Luis Caballero, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Luis Acuña, Santiago Cárdenas, Manuel Hernández, Darío Ortiz, among others, framed within three themes: new roles of the family and society; art, politics and activism; and abstraction.
New Roles of the Family and Society
The famous contraceptive pill, perfected in the late 1950s and widely adopted during the 1960s, radically changed, on the one hand, the role of women within the family, and on the other, the very concept of sexual relations, which were freed from the mere act of reproduction.
Families went from being large to much smaller, made up of between 4 and 5 people including the parents; the displacement from the countryside to the city brought with it a consequent urban impact due to housing shortages.
Of course, this is also deeply connected to changes in education; the mixed-gender educational setting opened up new relationships and behaviors among young people, who in turn were influenced by mass media, radio, film, and television.
Art, Politics and Activism
If we consider the political and ideological context of the 1960s, this decade saw a series of pivotal events that shaped the subsequent course of recent human history: the Cold War, in which the two blocs, each firmly entrenched within their borders, mobilized their entire ideological machinery to conquer peripheral nations. The space race, in which both powers competed to position themselves in the conquest of space, while covertly launching military espionage satellites that captured high-resolution photographs to locate their rivals’ missiles and military bases — the generation of codes and languages that were the first link toward what we would come to know as the Internet.
The Vietnam War, in which the forces deployed by the United States to fight the Viet Cong guerrillas — who were in turn backed by China and Russia — grew throughout the 1960s.
In Latin America, the Cuban Revolution encouraged many dissatisfied groups to form their own armed groups against the dominant system; insurgent groups emerged, inspired by resistance heroes such as Tupac Amaru, Sandino, Martí, Bolívar, and Zapata.
Abstraction
Shortly before the first half of the 20th century came to a close, Colombia produced its first abstract painting, by Marco Ospina. From then on, the new generation of artists who had the opportunity to travel abroad saw in abstraction an important vein through which to explore their creativity and free themselves from the figurative hegemony of the academy.
Abstraction enabled processes of analysis and synthesis, a greater emphasis on color as an expressive element independent of figure, the creation of sculptures or three-dimensional objects that were constructed rather than cast, carved, or molded, and the consolidation of a language that no longer needed to appeal to resemblance or representation in order to be validated.
The abstract act did not disconnect them from reality; rather, they managed to communicate many national realities and historical events in a broader and more forceful way.
The exhibition opens on March 9 and will be open to the public until April 9, 2016.