In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the traditional art object — conceived to generate pleasure for our senses — began to acquire new formal and conceptual characteristics, thanks to the artist’s reflection and gesture of appropriation. Thus, in some cases, the new productions from this period moved diametrically away from painting, sculpture, and printmaking to involve industrial, found, and simulated objects drawn from everyday life.
Treasures to be Found
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the traditional art object — conceived to generate pleasure for our senses — began to acquire new formal and conceptual characteristics, thanks to the artist’s reflection and gesture of appropriation. Thus, in some cases, the new productions from this period moved diametrically away from painting, sculpture, and printmaking to involve industrial, found, and simulated objects drawn from everyday life.
It would be in the 20th century that the art object and its intentions, in some cases, focused on erasing the distinction between high or elevated art and popular art, demolishing common assumptions about artistic genius, poetically transforming everyday objects into “treasures,” and revealing art’s mercantile character as well as its circuits of exhibition and socialization.
This exhibition is an invitation to engage with the discourses, processes, and artists associated with object-based art in Colombia over these 50 years of the MAC’s work. Its presence and reflection call on us to think that art is no different from the rest of the material and symbolic productions that construct the notions of reality we take for granted. In doing so, we generate complex and paradoxical dynamics that decontextualize and recontextualize the objects we consume, both in the spaces of social life and in the field of art; allowing the boundaries between the cultured, the popular, the public, and the private to blur.
The show opens on May 26 at 6:00 pm and will be open to the public until June 26, 2016.
Santiago Rodríguez Ortíz
Guest Curator