This collection began to form more than 30 years ago through the organizations that preceded AENA in making decisions about investments in aeronautical infrastructure. Most of the paintings, sculptures, murals and graphic works that make up the Collection correspond, with some important exceptions, to the most recent Spanish and Ibero-American artistic production where the most significant trends of contemporary art are represented.The selection shown at the MACA corresponds to an excellent generation of artists that represent the best of Spanish art from the last quarter of the twentieth century. The selected works stand out for their contemporaneity and expressive force and provoke an intense emotional impact on the viewer.

Before Art was a group of artists formed in Valencia, at the end of the sixties of the last century, whose trajectory enjoys singular importance in the course that Spanish contemporary art has followed. The interest of their investigations lies in their special approach to the relationship between art and science; or, rather, in the consideration tending, in conceptual terms, to the undifferentiation of the possibilities of action between both fields of knowledge.The proposed exhibition constitutes a retrospective look at the short, yet tremendously intense, trajectory of this artistic collective in a time of special historical significance, such as that surrounding the year 1968. Fundamentally, a considerable part of the works that made up the three main exhibitions of the group is brought together (School of Architects, Valencia, 1968; Eurocasa Gallery, Madrid, 1968; and As Gallery, Barcelona, 1969).It is intended to reproduce, half a century later, the atmosphere of those exhibitions in which objects and mobile devices capable of generating diverse optical, perceptual and structural experiences were presented to the viewer (resorting, by the way, in many occasions, to the same physical foundations that the mass media and advertising companies of the time employed). And this is done with the dual intention of highlighting the interest and relevance of that initiative and, furthermore, to assess the influence it had on the trajectories of the participating artists.

First exhibition of MACA's own production, carried out in collaboration with the Tomás y Valiente Art Center, CEART of Fuenlabrada. This exhibition invites us to establish a game of parallels by introducing the temporal factor and delving deeper into the theme that accentuates its aesthetic values. The same subject developed at different aesthetic moments of his artistic trajectory results in suggestive pairs of works in which Tàpies confronts himself, offering different visions between the artist of yesterday and almost of today, always with the common denominator of intensity and strength. With the passage of time, that energy, that vigor in gesturality, becomes more latent. His forceful stroke seems accompanied by an arm and a heart that are increasingly youthful. It is not necessary to make a retrospective to observe this reality, as any of his pieces contains it.The selected pieces are of great technical diversity: from the characteristic mixed techniques based on matter on canvas or panel, collages of objects or textures, painting on canvas, assemblages or graphite on paper.The exhibition also integrates an assemblage on chamotted earth, that is, one of the artist's famous ceramic pieces. The technical diversity is evident and, nevertheless, the unitary sensation of the whole is equally clearly perceptible. Our vision as spectators will act as parallel editing and will jump from one painting to another to find the coincidences and extract the new meanings that undoubtedly arise beyond the isolated contemplation of a particular work. As a whole, the exhibited work is striking, not only because of the character of its iconography (dual, complementary, contradictory) but also because of the authentic struggle that is established between darkness and light that does not obey exclusively the tenebrist heritage or Spanish Baroque painting. Capital themes such as love and pain or life and death are the most present in Tàpies' work.

Pablo Palazuelo is one of the key figures in Spanish art of the second half of the twentieth century. An exceptional artist within the panorama of Spanish abstract art, not only because he is the author of a full and rich body of work in its diversity that makes him singular, but also because he departs from the general trends in which the rest of the artists of his generation were inscribed, more interested in material or gestural abstraction. His work, always meticulous and pristine, responds to a very personal geometric conception characterized by an extremely refined technique and an admirable sense of color, constants that are always present throughout his entire career.This exhibition titled Palazuelo. Musical Calligraphies aimed to approach the artist's work from his relationship with music, exploring the intimate relationship that exists between his work, sound and silence. It allowed one to contemplate how musical language underlies the entire trajectory of the Madrid-born creator as a common denominator element. The exhibition presents works from public and private institutions, from museums and foundations as well as from private collectors who generously lent their works for this exhibition, without which it would not have been possible.

The artist has been using photography since the early 1970s with the aim of finding other options to the dominant color in his painting: to open an investigation that neutralizes his violent use of complementary colors.This experimental photographic practice allows him to investigate the construction, reconstruction and destruction of the image. Transformation techniques such as photography, but also printing, photocopying and collage recycling themselves and working in a spiral. Through these techniques Gordillo adopts modes of optical and constructivist art such as serialization, repetition, variants and differences between the almost identical that allow him to unfold, simultaneize and obsessively copy the same image.Working with the negative and positive of the image, superimposed or sometimes slightly displaced, and also decomposed into the four colors of four-color printing, Gordillo converts the resulting images into "schizoid," a singular style steeped in ironic melancholy partly influenced by his long psychoanalytic practice.Gordillo, in his collector's zeal, accumulates both banal objects from popular culture and images from the press, making a broad radiography of reality; from all of this psychedelic images emerge, sometimes close to pop.The photographic processes carried out basically in the 1970s illuminate a way of understanding the creative process of Luis Gordillo, sometimes stranded between chance and automatism, but always disturbing where some of the artist's obsessions emerge: the encounter with absurd objects, the incoherent and endless accumulation of items he has been collecting for years. Decontextualized things and laden with plastic significance that he uses as visual material that result in psychedelic images sometimes close to pop, laden with a preset and manic humor. And this so libertarian way of making photography leads us to propose this series of works transcribed from psychoanalysis to make up the exhibition of Luis Gordillo.

The exhibition focuses on the idea of woman and her body in interrelation with time and space. A body, that of the artist herself, from which she produces actions and creative works. And, from which, she traverses and measures space and, in turn, is crossed by time, even showing the aging of a woman, confronted with the idea and promotion of eternal feminine youth fostered by the patriarchal system. And that body is also transferred to photography, installations, drawings and even video, through self-portraits of her face and body fragments, in performative attitudes. Furthermore, a bodily action, shown through a series of images and audiovisuals that, as documentation of a selection of performances, are offered as visual and sound narrative media, alongside "the scores" or scripts that she constructs to continue in the execution of her performances. In short, an entire multi and interdisciplinary performative exhibition route expanded from action to plastic works and vice versa, its incitement to the realization of actions by the public or its mere evocation, or else the visual pieces as traces or remains of performances. While showing us her own body set in motion in time and space, seen and read as a meaning of symbolic layers and deconstructive representations of the patriarchal gaze on the female body. And, all of this, bathed in a certain sense of acerbic humor, the conjugation of the absurd and chance encounters with objects, words and signs.