LLEI D'ART 11

The Joan Miró Foundation presents Before the Horizon , an exhibition dedicated to the depiction of the horizon in art from the mid-19th century to now. The collection that can be visited is a commission by Martina Millà and has the support of the BBVA Foundation. The chosen works, including painting, photography and sculpture, share the horizon as a defining feature. The exhibition covers its representation as an artistic object and how it has become a reflection of the changes in the art world. Using subtle exchanges between works that have no defined chronological pattern, the collection creates room for a reflection on the importance of the horizon in the development of modern art until today. The title is already a direct reference to Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images , a study by Georges Didi-Huberman that investigates anachronism in the history of art. Using Didi-Huberman’s ideas, the exhibition presents the works in the form of anachronic conversations between pictorial, photographic and sculptural depictions of the horizon from Romanticism and Impressionism until the current day. The collection displays sixty national and international works from some of the great figures of 19 th - and 20 th -century art, like Arnold Böcklin, Claude Monet, Eadweard Muybridge, Ed Ruscha, Carl Andre, David Hockney, Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró, Perejaume or René Magritte. In fact, the horizon was a subject that fascinated Miró throughout his long career which he learnt from his master, Modest Urgell, who is also represented in the collection. Perejaume, a disciple of both artists, completes the conversation with his particular postmodern take on the subject. The exhibition takes in a geographical overview of horizon paintings from German, Swiss and Scandinavian Symbolism and Romanticism, to the French avant-garde which dominated artistic creation until well into the 20 th century, as well as the interesting contrasts between traditional German forms and Japanese art. In addition, it includes works ruled by the laws of perspective as well as pieces that defied them, and were key to the creation of pictorial modernity: the mystic horizons of artists like Marc Chagall or the horizons of industrial and post-industrial landscapes as illustrated by the work of Georg Baselitz and David Hockney. The exhibition also includes two rooms dedicated to sculptural horizons, where works by Eduardo Chillida and Anna Versonica Janssens converse; the projection of the film Running Fence , which recounts an intervention in the Californian countryside by Christo and Jeanne-Claude; as well as other horizon sculptures such as those in the dialogue between Dan Flavin and Carl André. Similarly, Carl André’s and Dan Flavin’s pieces function as an introduction to a second large collection focussed on the North American horizon, which gives way to the postcolonial photographic horizons of Julien and Sedira, and culminates in a selection of paintings by René Magritte, Claude Monet, Alphonse Obsert, Olafur Eliasson and Antoni Llena that functions as an epilogue: the depiction of the horizon alludes to the paradoxes and the challenges of artistic practice. Gerhard Richter. Paisaje cerca de Hubbelrath/ Landscape near Hubbelrath , 1969. Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aquisgran. © Gerhard Richter 2013 15