Collection. From the post-war period to the contemporary era

Es Baluard Museu presents a new interpretation of the Collection based on the artistic practices developed from 1940 to 2017. Structured around two chronological fields, the selection -67 works of art exhibited together with documents- explores, by way of a sequence, the connections and intersections existing between the local, national and international artistic contexts.

The route through time begins with the European context of the post-war period and the new approaches and depictions of reality that emerged between 1940 and 1977: Existentialism, represented by Wols; the continuity/break with the avant-gardes through key figures such as F. Léger, Marie Laurencin, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque or André Masson; material and gestural abstraction, represented by Antoni Tàpies, Hans Hartung and Rafael Tur Costa; the origins of video art in Europe with Robert Cahen as a prominent model, and the introduction in Mallorca of the new practices associated to conceptualism in the 1970s –mail art and visual poetry among them- through the documentary reserve Risc i ruptura. Arxius 1973-1983 by the creators Pep Canyelles, Jaume Pinya and Horacio Sapere, deposited in 2019.

This second section includes a special area dedicated to Joan Miró; an outstanding selection of works from the Serra Collection and the Miró Family -painting, graphic work and drawing- covers his creative process from 1966 to 1977, years in which he maintained an intense technical and conceptual level, and reflects his active participation in the Mallorcan cultural scene.

The second period, centred on the years 1978-2017, signals the global context marked by the search for recognition of photography as an artistic medium since the 1960s, whilst other, new media emerge, like the installation and the performance. The defence of painting in Europe in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties -the figurative route and the proposal linked to abstraction- relegates sculptural practice to the background; a practice influenced by Minimalism, Constructivism and Conceptualism, and characterised by the geometric reduction of form and figuration.

The recording of the individual and collective memory, the debate on the economic, social and political transformations that have taken place in both East and West over recent decades, the dominance of new technology and the expansion towards other fields of research -biotechnology, for example- determine, amongst other fields, the opening-up to new significances contained in and transmitted by artwork from the end of the 20^th century to the present day. Ignasi Aballí, Nevin Aladağ, Amador, Andrea Büttner, Miquel Barceló, Miguel Ángel Campano, Pepe Cañabate, Lawrence Carroll, Adriano Costa, Amparo Garrido, Luis Gordillo, Rafel Joan, Ángeles Marco, Lydia Okumura, Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, Tomás Saraceno, Antoni Socías, Mladen Stilinovic, Eulàlia Valldosera and Francesca Woodman conclude the selection of artists.