The director of the IVAM, Nuria Enguita, pointed out in the presentation of the Popular exhibition the difficulty of defining a term as popular, “so elusive” and yet, on the other hand, so omnipresent. The question remained in the air: What is popular? Regarding this question, curator Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, 1964), artist, editor, essayist, flamencologist and singular figure in the Spanish creative panorama, has built a voluminous and plural exhibition, nearly 1,500 works, mostly from the collection from the IVAM and other centers and funds, including the Reina Sofía and the MNAC, which invade, we could almost say upholster, the two galleries of the museum where the exhibition is on display.
A project that, in the opinion of the director of the Valencian art center, “continues this transversal reading of the collection as one of the IVAM's lines of work.” From this multiple and crossed vision, the exhibition investigates what is popular, current or slippery magma that “circulates beneath the artists' works,” according to Pedro G. Romero; They are not the products of mass culture – although it is associated with them – nor folklore; nor the art of the people or the identity of the country; nor, although it is visualized in them, the clichés and souvenirs where another term equally elusive and sticky as kitsch, that “art of bad taste” in the words of the sociologist Gillo Dorfles, takes category.
However, what is popular “appears, disappears and reappears among all those denials,” says Romero. From this line of critical research, the exhibition proposes an immersive tour based on a copious selection of the IVAM collection as an interrogative axis: paintings, sculptures, engravings, installations, photographs, books and documentation material exhibited as working ingredients. “It is a reading against the grain of the collection,” says the director: “it covers it with totally new questions that concern the popular, the people, the populace, populism.” An exhibition that reflects on “the great question of our time, between various populisms and mass culture, where our present lies.”
From a nineteenth-century Republican poster from the newspaper El Pueblo created by Joaquín Sorolla for the publication of his friend Vicente Blasco Ibáñez to the performances of the Guerilla Girls activists or the stark photographs of Cindy Sherman, the exhibition opens on different fronts. The posters by Josep Renau and other illustrators of the Civil War or the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s mark the first exhibition steps. “The popular imagination was born in Spain with the Napoleonic invasion, later, with the Civil War, the rhetoric of the Spanish people was used by both sides as their legitimate representatives,” says Romero.
In this exploration of the cultural imaginary of the popular, the exhibition focuses on those marginal groups without political representation, but who paradoxically project the idea of the popular into that imaginary. “This is the case of the gypsies in our country, who symbolize the Spanish imagination; There is the figure of Carmen, the bulls, the flamenco...”, says Romero. Collectives dispossessed of their rights, women, blacks, homosexuals, crazy people, Latin American or Maghreb migrants “traverse that imagination that we call popular, as Romero recalled in the presentation. “There are those who have no voice.”
The exhibition delves into two large supply deposits of the IVAM collection, on the one hand the funds of the historical avant-garde of the last 20th century, and on the other, the languages of Pop, as periods where the popular takes a presence. In the first you can see a selection of works by Alexander Rodchenko, John Heartfield, Moholy-Nagy, George Grosz, among others, rereading the different sections; In the case of Pop Art, the work of an artist as decisive as the English painter Richard Hamilton or the Valencians from Equipo Realidad. Among the collections on display, the erotic and anti-Franco toys of the artist José Maria Gorris, founding member of the Estampa Popular group, an artistic collective that closes the exhibition itinerary, stand out.
As complementary material, the exhibition adds a sound tour where we must highlight the collaboration of the singer Niño de Elche, who has created a series of musical pieces based on the works on display as well as the rescue of the scores of the composer Jaroslav Jezek illustrated by the architect Frantisek Zelenka, two Czech creators of Jewish origin and tragic ends, and a series of musical pieces selected by curator Pedro G. Romero.
Popular. IVAM. Valencia.www.ivam.es. Until April 14, 2024
