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Exhibitions

Stone sculpture in La Pedrera

A careful selection of more than eighty works from different public and private collections.

'Conclusión experimental B para Mondrian', Jorge Oteiza (1973)
Stone sculpture in La Pedrera

Experimentation and innovation. These are the premises that guide a series of artistic movements from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1930s in Europe. We are talking about the historical avant-gardes. We are in a period between the wars in which artists consider art as an act of subversion: they want to break with bourgeois tradition and be modern. For this reason, they enter completely unexplored fields in the world of art and use the tools provided by industrial society. Specifically, the sculptural language enhances its expressiveness to unsuspected limits through transgressive techniques, procedures and materials.

Stone, despite being a very traditional material, since it was the first ally that human beings had in their confrontation with the natural environment, played a key role in the evolution of modern sculpture. During the first third of the 20th century, several sculptors returned to direct carving in stone, without any intermediary. Instead of making models in clay or plaster, and then having qualified technicians create the final work, they carved their own works, of abstract inspiration, as a new attitude of modernity.

The exhibition Art in Stone, presented by the Fundació Catalunya la Pedrera, with more than fifty pieces, celebrates the stone structure of Casa Milà –popularly known as la Pedrera– and places some of the late carvings of eight historical sculptors, born between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, inside Antoni Gaudí's building; it describes their artistic paths, often parallel, in the investigation of these new ways of expression and points out points of confluence.

Stone sculpture in La Pedrera 'Germinal', Louise Bourgeois, (1967-1992)

Jean Arp (Strasbourg, 1887 – Basel, 1966), Louise Bourgeois (Paris, 1911 – New York, 2010), Eduardo Chillida (Donostia, 1924 – 2002), Naum Gabo (Bryansk, Russian Empire, 1890 – Waterbury, USA, 1977), Barbara Hepworth (Wakefield, United Kingdom, 1903 – St. Ives, 1975), Henry Moore (Castleford, England, 1898 – Much Hadham, England, 1986), Isamu Noguchi (Los Angeles, 1904 – New York, 1988) or Jorge Oteiza (Orio, 1908 – Donostia, 2003), among others, give prominence to the poetic and expressive capacity of the material and the consideration of space. Apart from these abstract works, which enter into dialogue with La Pedrera, a complementary section allows us to see how the "pioneers" of modern sculpture stimulated the following generation –Stephen Cox, Luciano Fabro, Barry Flanagan, Cristina Iglesias, Anish Kapoor, Ettore Spalletti and Alison Wilding–, and also how stone has been the inspiration for new conceptual ways of working.

Curated by Penelope Curtis, former director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and the Tate Britain in London, the exhibition focuses particularly on one of the main innovators of British sculpture who was part of the international avant-garde of the 1930s: Barbara Hepworth. Influenced by Henry Moore, both shared an artistic vision of the primal in terms of the materials they used in a disruptive way. During their stays in Paris, both captured the modernity extracted from artists such as Brancusi who investigated primitive art. One of Hepworth's great contributions was the introduction of emptiness in works of an abstract nature, although nature always served as a common thread.

Stone sculpture in La Pedrera ‘Large and small form’, Barbara Hepworth (1934)

Casa Milà –begun in 1906 and completed in 1912– represents the most advanced reflection on a building on a chamfer in Barcelona's Eixample due to its advanced constructive and functional solutions, as well as its ornamental and decorative solutions that break with the architectural styles of its time. The façade of La Pedrera is not structural, it loses its traditional function as a load-bearing wall and becomes a curtain wall. The stone blocks (more than six thousand) are joined to the framework by metal elements, which is why large windows could be opened. There are three types of stone: in the lower parts and in some of the elements of the body, limestone from Garraf; in large volumes, stone from Vilafranca del Penedès, and sporadically (the frames of some windows), limestone from Ulldecona. Inscribed on the World Heritage List, in 1984 it was declared a cultural property of the world heritage by UNESCO, along with Park Güell and Palau Güell.

Stone sculpture in La Pedrera 'Sense títol (III)', Anish Kapoor (1997)

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