Object, Body, and Space

Avant-garde art has always sought to rethink the artistic object, its creative processes, and its relationship with the viewer. From the 1960s onwards, the second wave of the 20th-century avant-garde in Europe, the United States, and Latin America retraced this path. Artists rethought sculpture without regard for the base and in direct dialogue with architectural space; they abandoned painting or reduced it to a minimum in chromatic and formal terms, as if reducing it to its essential elements; or, quite the opposite, they cleaved to everyday life and focused on the individual or collective body, using photography as a means of fixing life and action, movement, and their relationship with the world.

The exhibition, which includes works from the Berardo Collection, the Holma/Ellipse Collection, the Teixeira de Freitas Collection, and CACE, follows a path that starts from artistic movements born during the 1960s (namely Minimalism, Arte Povera and Conceptualism) to focus on the connection between the individual proposals of the artists, who are progressively less grouped into artistic movements.
There are, however, some recognisable threads. On the one hand, there is a broadening of the geographical and cultural origins of the different artistic proposals, in a process that is both globalisation and diversification. On the other, the conflicts inherent in recognising the rights of minorities and the political commitment of many artists gains significant expression.The installation of the exhibition, which will periodically be subject to readjustments and new juxtapositions, favours dialogue between works that are often formally divergent, but which have links in the issues they address: strangeness, criticism of racial and colonial domination, the fading of the object in the presence of the word or text, memory, the body, and sexuality. In this non-chronological journey, each room poses questions, interrogations, and relationships, in a journey that is also a challenge to the viewer.

The works selected from the collections on display at the Museum, namely the Berardo Collection, propose a visit along this path and its subsequent developments, while also looking to other geographies and latitudes with different declinations of the same critical concerns from other cultural contexts.