Light and Movement. The Kinetic Avant-Garde in Paris 1950-1975

The question of movement, light and their representation runs through the history of art. From the 1950s onwards, following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner and László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder, artists began to integrate these forces into their creations, shaping a new vision of reality in which nothing is fixed and definitive but rather unstable and indeterminate, in constant movement: the works live in the present, change, are never exhausted. Kinetic movement develops in Europe as an international constellation formed by a new generation of artists who want to radically transform art by opposing the myth of the work, a unique, defined and totemic object destined for an elite, personal expression of the artist, creative genius secluded in their ivory tower. These new breed of artists want to modernize the artistic object, open it to reality by integrating new materials and industrial techniques; from a social perspective, to produce art for a wider audience, participatory art, to propose an active role for both the artist and the spectator. 

Movement embodies the new mutual relationship, physical and emotional, that is established between spectator and work, it is a mouvement émouvant [moving movement], as Vasarely describes it in 1955: the works are living bodies that are reflected in the moving body of the spectator and enter into relationship with him, involving him in an exercise of conscious freedom. 

Light and Movement opens a perspective on the rich vitality of this international tendency in the active Parisian context, whose influence will also nourish Spanish artistic debate, focusing on the period of its fascinating creative development and maximum recognition between 1955, the year of the historic exhibition Le Mouvement at the Denise René gallery in Paris, and 1975. The works of the protagonists of this avant-garde, coming from private collections, galleries and Parisian institutions, will resonate and be enriched in dialogue with the exceptional collection of kinetic works at the MACA, a donation by Eusebio Sempere.