Opening of the exhibition “Collection 13. Toward a new museum of contemporary art” in CA2M with works by the ARCO Foundation

Toward a new museum of contemporary art, curated by Sergio Rubira, which proposes to revise some of the devises that were used in several public museums linked to contemporary art in Madrid since the foundation of the Prado Museum in 1819. To this end, the collection of CA2M and Fundación ARCO will be used to examine how some of these historical exhibitions were mounted.

However, it is not a case of reconstructing them. Rather, the idea is to see how those forms of mounting would function today, and trying to evince how the perception and meaning of the artworks are conditioned by the way they are exhibited. These dispositifs translated the ideas of art, exhibition and spectator in the eras in which they were initially enacted and even tied them in with the representation of power, associating them with the concept of authority, and the construction of identities. They became an element that mediated and modified the interpretation of the works.

The exhibition opens with a recreation of the mounting of the Prado Museum, founded in 1819; since its beginnings this museum dedicated space to the work of living artists, as borne out by its first catalogues. It continues with the Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1898, following demands from the artists of the time who called for a space of their own, and then the unrealised project designed by the architect Fernando García Mercadal for a “new Museum of Modern Art” during the period of the Second Republic, which won the National Architecture Prize in 1933.

COLLECTION 12. TOWARD A NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Opening JUN 23rd
24 JUN — 25 SEP 2016

CURATOR: SERGIO RUBIRA