Art in a Wasteland

The endings of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War propose antagonistic worlds, radically different scenarios, but both must be built upon barren ground; in pain, in the ruins and material and ethical debris that absolute destruction from war produces. And it does so under complex vital conditions: in exile, in emigration, in repression.

The two postwar periods represented a radical break for the history of culture. In Franco's Spain, the aesthetic project imagined from the Falange would attempt to reduce culture to state propaganda, break with the experimentalism of the avant-gardes and return to a certain academicism articulated from the idea of the national and the Catholic. In the nineteen fifties the need for international legitimation of the Regime would seek to continue instrumentalizing culture, but from an approach to more contemporary languages. That said, without losing the essences of "the Spanish and the Catholic." In the rest of the world, devastated after the war and its horrors, the break with the previous avant-gardes would come from the disturbing question about the relationship between civilization and barbarism. In both cases totalitarianisms, violence or cultural misery forced numerous artists to emigrate, to go into exile, and to work in the open. But their journey singularly enriched those territories that welcomed them.

Constituted fundamentally by works belonging to the IVAM collection, this exhibition attempts a reading in which more than the differences in style, continuities are contemplated, similarities, mutual echoes, the shared effort, when the fabric of historical events is such that it becomes absolutely determining in poetic, discursive, formal or stylistic decisions; in humanity's gaze and thought about itself