MALAGA.- The Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga is presenting At Home I’m a Tourist, a group exhibition curated by Fernando Francés which comprises a selection of toys and art editions from the collection of Selim Varol. This German collector of Turkish origin possesses around 15,000 pieces by contemporary artists of the stature of Banksy, KAWS, ZEVS, Shepard Fairey – OBEY, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Audrey Kawasaki, FUTURA and JR, who have designed unique and unmistakeable toys and other objects. This selection makes reference and pays tribute to urban art and the iconography of a particular period and generation spanning the 1990s and until the present century. The exhibition is one of the events that has been organised to mark the 10th Anniversary of the CAC Málaga (2003-2013).
“I believe that we are all born with the hunter-gatherer instinct, which in particular means that we seek out things and collect them,” explains Selim Varol, who has amassed one of the largest collections of designer toys and art editions in the world. The CAC Málaga is now presenting a selection of 1,350 pieces from this collection, which includes works by leading names in contemporary art such as KAWS, Banksy, JR, Shepard Fairey and the Fuchs brothers, Daniel and Geo. In addition to being a collective exhibition made up of a wide variety of different works, At Home I’m a Tourist offers a faithful reflection of a specific period and generation of the 1980s and 1990s with pronounced influences of Pop Art and urban art.
For Fernando Francés, Director of the CAC Málaga: “These toys and art editions are characterised by a unique feature, which is the fact that they are made by artists. They express a special, unique and unmistakeable gaze that transforms a simple, child’s objects into a work of art. They involve a reinterpretation of story-book and comic characters and an entirely new viewpoint on animation, which helped to create a whole new generation, and which represents them in a new way, far from the child’s bedroom or realms of fantasy. Now they are in a display case, on the wall or on a pedestal, representing a different function and transforming the childhood discourse into an adult conversation between the work of art and the viewer.”
The present exhibition offers a representation of the 20th century’s principal icons. The world of advertising and urban art contributed to permanently fixing certain images in the collective imagination and making them easily recognisable to all. This collection documents an entire era and one that, as the heir to Pop Art and influenced by important artists such as Andy Warhol and Basquiat, has a dual function: on the one hand the playful facet of art and on the other, the social critique that underlies it.
Urban art began to be appreciated in New York in the late 1960s when the streets, walls and subway cars became a vast canvas used for creating graffiti by artists who have become notably influential today. Art thus emerged from the museum onto the street and it was possible to see artistic creations in public spaces, which encouraged other types of reflections that were not necessarily confined to the field of culture. This trend was picked up in other cities and countries and numerous leading artists began to reflect these scenes in their work. Some eventually moved from the street to exhibiting in museums and galleries while this collective also looked to advertising, to the media and to supports and messages that had a commercial aim. The repetition of these messages, using techniques essentially derived from advertising, was inherited from Pop Art and was soon assimilated by street artists.
Maintaining a fine line between cultural and commercial value, the “artistic product” revolutionised the contemporary art scene when artists and gallerists began to sell objects that were accessible to everyone through special editions of their works, resulting in a market that began to deal in this concept. The early 1980s thus saw the rise of venues that specialised in these items while leading museums and galleries also created spaces for their sale. The mixture of art and fashion soon caught the attention of leading brand names, which appreciated and made use of this perfect combination.
With regard to toys, the reinterpretation of these childhood objects is an experience in which adults recognise them even though they have a different feel and the viewer is now an adult. The late 1990s saw the transition from toys as children’s playthings to toys as collectors’ items. “Urban Vinyl” or plastic figures created by artists such as Michael Lau, the graffiti artist KAWS and Takashi Murakami were the pioneers in this field. Their creations are original designs in limited editions, which makes them more appealing to the public. These pioneers were followed by illustrators and musicians, resulting in an alliance between different musical styles – Hip-Hop and Heavy Metal – and visual ones such as Japanese Manga.
Selim Varol is a German collector of Turkish origin who lives in Düsseldorf. He began to collect at the age of six when his parents gave him toys and his desire to recover these childhood objects made him turn to collecting at an early age. He later discovered urban art, which led him to acquire limited editions by leading artists in this field. In the 1990s Varol started to collect Japanese designer pieces. At the present time his collection numbers more than 15,000 works by 200 artists from 20 countries around the world. Varol is also an entrepreneur who owns the Café Toykio in Düsseldorf and sponsors various international projects. Last year the present exhibition was seen in Berlin with the title Art and Toys. After its showing at the CAC Málaga it will travel to the USA.
