Es Baluard year zero

Coinciding with its inauguration Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma presents the exhibition “Es Baluard year zero”, which shows a selection of works belonging to the museum’s own collection. A collection that illustrates some of the most important tendencies in art from the late 19^th century to our times.
 
With a nucleus of over 500 works, the collection comes into being from the funds deposited by the four entities that form the Fundació Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma: Ajuntament de Palma, Consell de Mallorca, Govern de les Illes Balears and Fundació d’Art Serra. The series of works deposited by “SA NOSTRA”, Caixa de Balears deserves particular attention and we should also highlight the collaboration of private collectors, artists and companies who wished to participate in the project by donating or depositing works.
 
The exhibition “Es Baluard year zero” revolves around eight spaces, the first of which is dedicated to the genre of landscape. Entitled “Mediterranean landscape”, it deals with modernism and post-modernism, without forgetting the roots of artists from the islands such as Ricard Anckermann, who started to abandon academicism at the end of the 19^th century to give way to the new trends. The works include a set of Mallorcan landscapes by artists linked to this region, namely Hermen Anglada-Camarasa, Antoni Gelabert, Sebastià Junyer Vidal, Joan Miró, Eliseu Meifrèn, Joaquim Mir, Santiago Rusiñol and Joaquín Sorolla.
 
“The renewal of Classicism in a century of feminine nudes and portraits” is the second ambience, dedicated to the female figure. Different figurative styles are represented: the return to classicism, realism or the new subjectivity, surrealism, etc., all of them represented in the selection of works that date from the decade of the 1910s to the ‘70s, with the image of the woman and the female nude as protagonists of the works of Kees Van Dongen, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurencin, René Magritte, Juli Ramis, Archie Gittes and Pablo Picasso. 
 
“The analytical current: experimentation with form, gesture and material”, is the title of the next ambience which presents works that refer to cubism and lyrical, informalist, geometric and expressionist abstraction. The geometrization of shapes, fragmented representation or the expression of what is invisible for the artists are some of the constant themes of the cubist facet we can appreciate in the works of María Blanchard, Albert Gleizes and Leo Gestel. From the second half of the 20^th century, the collection contains an important set of works by abstract artists that enable one to appreciate different paths of investigation: the exploration of shape and colour in the work of Sergei Poliakoff and Juli Ramis; the gestural language of Georges Mathieu, Jean Fautrier, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Nicolas de Staël, Hans Hartung, André Masson, Will Faber and Frank El Punto; the mark of North American expressionism, present through a collage by Robert Motherwell and works by some of his disciples like Esteban Vicente and José Guerrero; the questioning of the traditional concept of painting in the work of Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana; and the geometric speculation of Victor Vasarely, Eusebio Sempere and José María Yturralde. The artistic reality of the Spanish post-war period is amply represented in this ambience by artists who renovated the pictorial and sculptural language, such as Antoni Tàpies, Manuel H. Mompó, Josep Guinovart, Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares, Luis Feito, Manuel Rivera, Pablo Serrano and Eduardo Chillida, among others. The exploration of abstract language is completed by the reference to Nordic expressionism with works by two of the members of the COBRA group, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn and the Dane Bengt Lindström.
 
“The Young Savages, Subjectivism in the Post-Modern era” is dedicated to the resurgence of painting with a tangible and expressive nature. It is what is known as neo-expressionism in Germany and transavanguardia in Italy. Representative artists of this tendency are Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and Francesco Clemente. It is also represented by the young generation of Spanish painters, the alternative to nearly a decade of conceptual asceticism which they contrast with an unmistakeable seal of lack of lack of concern and demythologization of the great themes, including Miquel Barceló, Miguel Ángel Campano, José Manuel Broto, José María Sicilia and Ferran García Sevilla.
 
The route continues with “Views of the present: art as metaphor”, a space dedicated to current artistic production, where new languages, techniques and media are explored, without entirely abandoning the traditional paths. Always faithful to their personal world, they have no need to overcome or reject the previous tendencies. Painting, sculpting, video-installation and photography are the proposals presented here, with which the artists aspire to carrying on transforming our consciences, as we can see in the pieces by Wolf Vostell, Antoni Socías, Fabrizio Plessi, Luis Gordillo, Jaume Plensa, Amador, Rebecca Horn, Susy Gómez, Juan Muñoz and Bernardí Roig.
 
“Miró and his radiance in contemporary art”, a space dedicated to the figure of Joan Miró, with a series of works from his Mallorcan period, produced for his circle of friends, reflecting the more spontaneous, intimate Miró. Alongside Miró, other exponents of surrealism are exhibited, and generational companions such as Wifredo Lam, Victor Brauner, Óscar Domínguez, Roberto Matta, Alexander Calder, Man Ray and Max Ernst, amongst others. 
 
“Ceramics by Picasso” contemplates the figure of Picasso through a remarkable collection of ceramic pieces created by the artist in the pottery of Madoura (France). Picasso managed to introduce and develop new themes in this traditional artistic language, such as bullfighting or music; he also created new typologies such as zoomorphic vases, and was able to abandon the utilitarian function of plates, platters and trays, turning them into authentic works of art.
 
In “Masters on paper”, works are show in which the spontaneity of the composition, the freedom of the stroke and the demand for new themes are a constant thread in the creative process of the artists represented in this ambience: from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustav Klimt and Amedeo Modigliani as faithful observers of the human figures in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, including the most deep-rooted social criticism in Spain with the work of José Gutiérrez Solana and Julio González, until reaching the pure abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró, among others.
 
On the museum’s outdoor terraces the ambience “Concentration and expansion: the forms of sculpture” is presented, with sculptural works by outstanding figures from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, such as Magdalena Abackanowicz, Ferrán Aguiló, Faustino Aizcorbe, Jean Arp, Richard Brotherton, Rafael Canogar, Anthony Caro, Barry Flanagan, Amadeo Gabino, Manuel H. Mompó, Jorge Oteiza, Pablo Palazuelo, Josep Maria Sirvent, etc. 
 
Location-Hall: Floor 0, Floor -1, Floor 1, outdoor Terraces 
Production: Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma