VALENCIA.- With the exhibition Abstraction in the IVAM Collection, the Museum is continuing with its project of organizing exhibitions to show items in its permanent collection, divided into different areas. Previous exhibitions in this series were devoted Photography, Installations and New Media, and Pop Art.

With this show, which includes 58 pictures and sculptures with dates ranging from 1913 to the end of the twentieth century, the IVAM is presenting an exhibition in which visitors can enjoy its extraordinary collection of abstract painting and sculpture.

The exhibition highlights the rich variety of individual voices and their approaches to abstraction. These artists popularized the vocabulary of painting and sculpture. The IVAM is unusually well endowed with contrasts of international voices and techniques belonging to the period from the twentieth century to the present day.

As Dore Ashton says: “The show brings together various trends in the Modernist mosaic to demonstrate the longevity of voices that have endured until the present day, and it highlights the importance of the activity of abstraction throughout the history of art.”

The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition contains illustrations of the works exhibited and essays by the exhibition’s curators, Dore Ashton and Consuelo Ciscar, and the art critic and philosopher Xavier Antich.

The twentieth century ushered in a giddy succession of changes in all aspects of life, including the visual arts, where abstraction was one of the most outstanding languages, perhaps one of those that best characterize the aesthetic aspirations of the time. Over the years, the IVAM has paid special attention to this area in its collection, acquiring works representative of the various tendencies of abstraction in twentieth-century art, such as Abstraction-Cr�ation, Cercle et Carr�, De Stijl, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Informalism and Minimalism, among others. This exhibition features works by over fifty artists who are fundamental for an understanding of the paths pursued in the search for art free from the requirement to represent reality. Among the artists whose work appears are Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, Hans Arp, Esteban Vicente, Joaqu�n Torres-Garc�a, L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, Julio Gonz�lez, Ad Reinhardt, Pierre Soulages, Antonio Saura, Antoni T�pies, Helmut Federle and Sean Scully. These artists and movements have featured in previous exhibitions presented by the IVAM.

In the early twentieth century, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were pioneers in the field of completely autonomous art. They adopted two opposite concepts of abstraction, two basic paths followed by later forms of abstraction. These two paths are well represented in the IVAM Collection. Kandinsky laid the foundations of the emotional facet, in which individual expression predominates. This trend continued in movements with an Expressionist quality, such as the New York School’s Action Painting, European Informalism in the forties and fifties, and all the later forms of Abstract Expressionism. Mondrian developed an analytical conception of painting in his search for art that transcended external reality, reducing it to geometrical shapes and pure colours to make it universal. This path was followed by art movements that concentrated on the exploration of form, such as Cercle et Carr� and Abstraction-Cr�ation in the thirties, and Geometrical Abstraction and Minimal Art in the sixties and seventies.

In 1917, in Holland, Piet Mondrian founded a movement called De Stijl, which helped to bring together a nucleus of international artists who focused on the idea of newness. They included artists such as Vantongerloo, Van der Leck, Vordemberge-Gildewart and František Kupka. Elsewhere, other artists also worked with equally abstract orientations. Among them were the Suprematists, headed by Malevich, and the Constructivists, with all their ramifications, ranging from Naum Gabo to L�szl� P�ri; and Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay showed the tension between figuration and abstraction, in images that suggested energy and movement. In the context of the First World War, avant-garde agitation took on a radical aspect with the emergence of Dada, a movement represented here by works by Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and Francis Picabia. The ideas of the Bauhaus came as a kind of counterbalance to the nihilism of Dada, providing a continuation of the utopianism of De Stijl and Constructivism. Many of the most stimulating European artists of the interwar years met at the Bauhaus, producing work that showed the full spectrum of the languages of modernity in combination with abstraction. They included L�szl� Moholy-Nagy and also Paul Klee, whose art heralded an increasingly pronounced shift towards subjectivity.

Sculptors and artists who explored the possibilities of abstraction in the period between the two World Wars included Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Joan Mir� and also Julio Gonz�lez, who, with Picasso, proposed a new way of understanding sculpture. In the thirties, however, abstraction began to be questioned and there was a return to realism, a development seen as marking a crisis in the avant-garde. Yet the crisis of art understood as pure experimentation with form coincided with the institutionalization of abstraction by the Cercle et Carr� group, founded by Joaqu�n Torres-Garc�a and Michel Seuphor, which was soon overtaken by another group, Abstraction-Cr�ation. Both groups tried to analyse, debate and exhibit abstract art with an analytical, geometrical orientation, perhaps as a deliberate response to Surrealism, which was acquiring an increasing following in Paris. This is the setting in which Jean H�lion’s work must be placed. In the years leading up to the Second World War, some voices called for a return to figurative forms and there was talk of the end of abstraction. But the language of abstraction was brought to the United States by artists who had arrived from Europe, such as Hans Hofmann, a key figure for the New York School. Other artists belonging to it were Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell, and younger figures such as Lee Krasner, Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorky and Esteban Vicente.

The great crisis that developed after the war brought a new generation of artists who produced Informalist styles which, like American Abstract Expressionism, rejected figuration and also form. Outstanding among the most representative artists is the work of Henri Michaux and Pierre Soulages in France, and Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares and Antoni T�pies in Spain. However, other facets of abstraction also emerged in Spanish abstract art in the second half of the twentieth century, including lyrical, constructive and matter-based abstraction. Among the artists represented, the works of Manuel H. Momp�, Eusebio Sempere, Gerardo Rueda, Albert R�fols-Casamada and Jordi Teixidor and the sculptors Eduardo Chillida, Mart�n Chirino and Andreu Alfaro illustrate the various trends adopted by abstraction in Spain in the second half of the twentieth century. The international abstraction of the last decades of the century is represented in this exhibition by the work of Richard Serra, Sean Scully, Per Kirkeby and Helmut Federle, and among the Spanish artists featured are Jos� Mar�a Sicilia and Carmen Calvo.