One of the most important lines of research in Montserrat Soto's work is the reflection on art through the spaces where it is displayed and housed. In 1997 - in Silences - the artist focuses her attention on the storage facilities of artworks in various museums, the places where art is not seen, where art rests. Subsequently, Soto undertakes the Secret Landscape project for five years, a series of photographs that captures the interiors of a collection of contemporary art collectors' homes in America and Europe. Art now becomes exclusive, accessible only to the owners and their guests in privacy. In the halls of MACA we can contemplate 13 of these photographs, belonging to the Telefónica Collection.
To carry out her project, the artist managed to slip into these homes; private spaces, inaccessible yet everyday, and far removed from the sacralization that surrounds artworks in museums. Bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, offices and even bathrooms are the containers of artistic works, many of them by highly sought-after authors, whose primary objective is to decorate these spaces. However, she transforms the private into the public and opens the door to an endless array of conceptual, symbolic and even psychological aspects, related to collecting.
Painting, sculpture, photography, ethnographic objects or decorative arts populate this series of photographs of anonymous residences awaiting to provoke in the spectator, who observes surprised and even astonished, all kinds of sensations and questions: For whom is such a quantity of objects gathered? What is the objective of owning a collection? What determines the selection of purchases? Does a collector always have good taste…?
Art as self-reference from its most unknown backstage for the common of mortals becomes a symbolic radiograph of the values of contemporary society. And it builds memory that, sometimes, belongs to everyone.
Workshop exhibition. Inhabiting art, photographs by Montserrat Soto in the Telefónica Collection
Primary Education
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27.02.2018
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02.04.2018
13 photographs belonging to the Secret Landscape series. A project by Montserrat Soto that captures the interiors of a collection of contemporary art collectors' homes in the Americas and Europe. Secret Landscape consists of spaces where art becomes exclusive and only accessible to the owners and their guests in private moments.The guided visit delves into the theoretical and stylistic keys of the artist and the technique employed. While also allowing for constant dialogue during the visit, where we can raise some questions such as: What is the objective of owning a collection? What happens to a private, inhabited and familiar space when it is filled with works of art, and these relate to everyday objects? Furthermore, we stop at some works to identify in the photographs which artists the pieces belong to. Pieces whose interpretation is modified and at the same time determined by those that accompany them in the domestic sphere, absolutely different from the gallery and museum contexts. We can deduce who some of the preferred living national or international artists are for private collecting.In collaboration with the Explicarte Association.
