In a video located right at the entrance, we see the Colombian artist Óscar Muñoz trying to no avail to establish his own image. He draws his self-portrait with a wet brush on a hot stone that will relentlessly erase his features as the sun evaporates the trace of the water. The operation is repeated over and over again, and each time the result is slightly different from the previous one. The video, a powerful metaphor for memory, is entitled Re/trato and in the rooms of CaixaForum Barcelona it acts as a magnificent gateway to The Human Image. Art, identities and symbolism, an exhibition produced in collaboration with the British Museum that is now coming to Barcelona (until October 22) after its successful visit to Madrid, Seville, Zaragoza and Palma.
The historical account that weaves together the exhibition covers almost 10,000 years, from what is possibly the oldest portrait in history, a human skull modeled in plaster in Jericho (8200-7500 BC), in whose eye sockets some seashells make the times of eyes, to plates of the electoral campaigns of Barack Obama and Donald Trump or an interactive installation by the digital artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Recorded Assembly, a device with several cameras that records the face of the people who stop before it and the Image overlaps with those of previous visitors. A technique used by the police to locate suspected people that here serves the opposite, generating crossed portraits that hide the identity of each individual.
The exhibition, curated by Brendan Moore, curated by the curator of the British Museum Brendan Moore, brings together artefacts and pieces of art from the London museum for the first time together with a selection of works from the La Caixa Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, as well as occasional loans, like the great portrait of Isabel la Católica by Luis de Madrazo from the Prado Museum, who has, among other roommates, one of the millions of Mao Tse Tung statuettes produced en masse during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In total, 151 works from practically all periods and geographical origins, from Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia to Africa, Japan, Mexico and Iran.
A journey that crosses time and different cultures and whose common denominator is "man's innate need to represent the human figure as a way of expressing himself and the world that surrounds him," says Moore, for whom the body is also, and above all, “a vehicle to transmit ideas”.
The exhibition is divided into six thematic areas: Ideal Beauty, Portraits, The Divine Body, The Political Body and The Bodily Transformation, and in them live Neolithic pieces by authors such as Goya, Manet, Dürer, Sebastiano del Piombo or Tàpies. In one of the most surprising sections, the curator shows how the ideal of beauty is a construction and how each culture tries to set its own canon. Or get out of it. The voluptuous figurine of an Indian goddess winking at Matisse's Great Odalisque Dressed in Striped Pants or Velázquez's Venus in the Mirror whose naked body has been covered by the Japanese artist Koya Abe with the tattoos worn by Japanese heroes and warriors.
The desire to transform the body and, therefore, identity is not something recent either. There is to remember the Chevalier d'Éon, diplomat, soldier and spy who in the eighteenth century adopted a female identity. He wore women's clothing but on his chest he wore the decorations obtained in a war mission.
