The Space of Dreams: BARCELONA

 

The exhibition has been curated by the expert Vicenç Altaió and counts on the participation of the film maker Albert Serra; the art curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist; the director of the Museums Dalí , Montse Aguer; the director of the Miró Foundation, Rosa Maria Malet, and the cultural consultant and art curator, Llucià Homs.

 

The aim of the exhibition is to penetrate into the world of dreams, an essential element of the human dimension, as so many great writers, philosophers and scientists have shown throughout history. On the other hand, dreams have also been fundamental in the creative process of artists. And this is precisely the backbone of the project we are now presenting: how do artists interpret their dreams, to which extent are they relevant to their work, in how many different forms can dreams be brought to the visual arts. The starting point of the exhibition are two literary works: Trajectoire du rêve (1938), as the origin of the incursion of that which is oneiric and fantastic into the art world, and Dreams (1999), as evidence for the prevalence of dreams in our contemporaneity.

 

In the words of the curator, Vicenç Altaió: “The exploration begins with the paradigm shift that took place in the arts after the First World War. Dada, born on the barricades of dissident art, in cabaret, in the popular and grotesque underworld, confronted the norms of respectability with violence and arbitrary playfulness. Never more would represented reality be harmonious, or misleading; and art, sceptical of great values, defected from the academy and the canon.”

 

Dreams became a big well from which one could live subjectively an “other reality”, a radically individual adventure and one of avant-garde group that participates in the exploration of the inner world and that, together with the poetry whose origins lie in the irrational and the instincts, and the science of myth, caused a revolt against harmony and idealism. Forms and method were taken from dreams, as illustrates the work of the artists represented in the exhibition: Dalí, Picasso, Miró, Magritte, Calder, Domínguez, Chagall, Tàpies, Duchamp, Hamilton, Ponç and Brossa.

 

 

Without distinction between the visual code and the textual code, and with an exhibition catalogue that will be presented when the show opens in Barcelona, “The Space of Dreams” follows the exploration path represented by André Breton’s book Trajectoire du rêve, published in 1938 (a compilation of written and painted dreams by various artists), and Georges Hugnet’s poems and photo collages, gathered under the significant title of La sèptieme face du dé (1936) and with a cover designed by Duchamp. Besides Altaió’s essay, the catalogue includes a dialogue with the renowned art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, who —together with Francesco Bonami— gathered in Dreams a new generation of artists on the occasion of the project presented at the Venice Biennale at the turn of the 21st century, in 1999. An epilogue by film maker and philologist Albert Serra concludes the exhibition catalogue.