The pulse of the body. Uses and representations of space. Per Amor a l’Art Collection

This exhibition is the second public presentation of works from the Per Amor a l’Art Collection. This time, the exhibition brings together a selection of works, by many artists and from different times and countries, that offers an insight into the social construction of space, the ways in which we represent, reproduce, know or inhabit places.

Artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, David Goldblatt, Takashi Hamaguchi, or Paul Graham, focus on capturing the collective by establishing a relationship between place, experience, the body and human relations. Other artists reproduce the body in a more intimate manner, in compositions where the body fuses with space—Francesca Woodman—or resists disappearing—Óscar Muñoz.

The city is also portrayed as a place of modernity, or as a place of conflict between architecture and memory, or between public and private interests, as in the work of Yto Barrada, Edward Ruscha, and Xavier Ribas. The city is also depicted as an inventory by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Manolo Laguillo and José Guerrero. These spaces are inhabited by our bodies, they become filled with different meanings and introduce cultural, political and social contexts, as in the work of Antoni Miralda, Sanja Iveković and Antoni Muntadas.

The work of Lewis Baltz and Timm Rautert captures, from a distance, the urban conquests of technological and industrial development, with its power to transform the landscape. Finally, Matt Mullican and Carlos Garaicoa focus on the power of language and signs on the definition of spaces.

The thread running through this exhibition is the possibility of making visible the relations and exchanges which, on a day-to-day basis, reproduce and reconstruct the physical and social space, as well as the permanent movement from the subjective to the collective.