La exposición de arte visual novelada por Enrique Vila-Matas

The Art Exhibition as a Novel by Enrique Vila-Matas. I set out to analyze, using the New Rhetoric methods, the book entitled Cabinet d`amateur, an oblique novel published by the contemporary Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas in 2019, at the same time as the opening of an exhibition whose curator he was in the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Choosing the six visual art works, different in nature, concept, and aesthetics, from the collection of the “laCaixa” Foundation represents an occasion for the writer, led by curiosity, to investigate the works of art and to make a personal, purely subjective selection, on which he reflects in his heterogenic work as a genre: the catalogue of an exhibition, memoirs, essay (auto)biography, the skeleton of an oblique novel of the future. The selected works of art (I.G., the mysterious portrait of a woman by the painter Gerhard Richter; an installation, Petite, by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster; a videoclip, La lección respiratoria, belonging to the artist Dora García; Milonga, Carlos Pazos’s self-portrait; a detailed scenery, Une poignée de terre, by Miquel Barceló and a photography of Theban by Andreas Gursky, in an overlap of an aerial view with one detailed figure) are included in the text as a starting point for meditations and reflections upon the nature of the art in general, because the metaphor of the literary work, the novel of the future, is precisely the building of Rem Koolhass, the library in Seattle, in which different styles overlap and whose shapes are imprecise, undetermined, incongruent, disharmonic and lacking in logic. Literature, visual arts, music, and architecture are associated, and different figures are used to point out the aesthetic of the negative and the idea that form and content are interchangeable. Keywords: Enrique Vila-Matas, Cabinet d´amateur, an oblique novel, general-rhetoric analysis, the exhibition as a novel, literary biography

El Color del COVID-19

Los museos pueden incorporar eventos destacados a su programación educativa, como es el caso de la pandemia Covid-19 que actualmente está afectando numerosos aspectos de la sociedad, tanto en aspectos personales, familiars, escolares y comunitarios. El Covid-19 se ha convertido en un centro de interés para las personas susceptible de ser aprovechado por las instituciones educativas. Entre ellas, el Museo Universidad de Navarra ha querido transformar la situación que esta pandemia genera en una oportunidad educativa. Para ello ha desarrollado el programa “256 colores, after Vik Muniz” con el principal objetivo de fomentar la inteligencia creativa y emocional en los escolares a través del arte. Se trata de un proyecto colaborativo en el que han participado 704 escolares de educación primaria de 23 centros educativos. La instrucción educativa programada utiliza la creatividad para generar una introspección que ayuda a la identificación y gestión emocional en esta situación de pandemia, buscando la experiencia significativa como método para fomenter un aprendizaje más significativo. La creatividad se ha potenciado mediante sinergias contextuales con obras de arte reales de las exposiciones del propio Museo, especialmente con la obra “256 colors, after Gerhard Richter” (2015), del artista brasileño Vik Muniz. La realidad generada por el Covid ha obligado al Museo a adaptarse para realizar el programa educativo en dos escenarios diferentes: modalidad presencial en el Museo o en el centro educativo. En este segundo caso la visita a la exposición del artista Vik Muniz se ha realizado de manera virtual.

EVALUATION OF PHOTOREALISTIC AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS IN GERHARD RICHTER WORKS

Gerhard Richter, who experiences different styles, production methods and methods together in his works; offers the audience different variations in artistic orientation and expressions. Gerhard Richter draws his own artistic boundaries with photorealistic paintings in which images and representations are reflected exactly, and abstract works created with an informal shaping attitude. While photographs, digital prints, blurring images are encountered in his photorealistic works, textured and vibrant colors are encountered in his abstract works. While Gerhard Richter includes figures, portraits, family photographs and landscapes in which grays are intense, with the traces of social associations formed in memory in the photorealistic period, he reflects the authentic values on the canvas surface in an ambiguous way. The abstract canvases reflecting the physicality and the intensity of the composition of colors, on the other hand, appear as the continuation, reflection and alteration of photographs, blur and ambiguity. In the research, it is aimed to examine the periods of the artist, which starts with photography and ends with abstract works, with production methods and methods. Diversity in production and styling, content representations reflected in the transformation of photographic images into pictorial forms; It turns into covered narratives with the transfer of the traces in the artist's memory to the artwork. The literature on Gerhard Richter and his works was scanned and the available data were analyzed with a descriptive method. In both periods shaped by social influence and spiritual impressions, it is observed that the artist diversified his production and included the language of expression shaped in concrete or abstract form through experimental practices in his works. Keywords: Gerhard Richter, photorealism, photography, abstract expressionism

Die Maske abgenommen

Peter Truschner's Die Maske abgenommen (The Mask Taken Off) is an inventory of the delicate relationship between artist and model, the like of which have never been seen before. The text spans an arc from antiquity to the current relationship between the sexes at eye level, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gerhard Richter. Jacques Rivette's film »La Belle Noiseuse«, starring Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart, serves as a guide. The text derives its particular charm from the fact that Peter Truschner not only reflects on the special circumstances of this collaboration, but also knows them firsthand and brings them to light: he is not only a writer, but also a photographic artist. For his new book of photographs, »She stood there a Loaded Gun,« he together with the performing artist Anna Petzer spent more than three years exploring the various facets of a complex, female persona.

Zaskarbić spojrzenie – obrazy, które chcą nas zjednać

The aim of the article is to rethink the way in which images convince us to adopt the perspective of another, which is the image itself. Starting from W.J.T. Mitchell’s theory on the desire and subjectivity of images, and Gottfried Boehm’s theory of the imagery, I look at a photographic and narrative album of Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge. This turns to itself for self-presentative and self-referential purposes. However, they do not aim to explore the essence of their medium, but “drag” the viewer into or out of the performance. I analyse situations in which we are forced to transfer our gaze to the materiality and objectivity of a picture, to its own existence. Such situations reinforce the effect of compassion, going far beyond literal meanings and content, which can be managed discursively.