BARCELONA.- Reflections concerning the surface, its material condition and the expansion of the pictorial field occupy a significant place in contemporary artistic practices and form the nucleus of this exhibition. Through 41 works by 24 international artists, MACBA Collection. Beneath the Surface raises the following question: how have disciplines such as painting and sculpture been altered and expanded to the point where matter is construed as a critical message?

Curated by Antònia Maria Perelló, many of the works in this exhibition explore post-Minimalist practices by incorporating the critical content that they contributed to the language of abstraction. The first section contains works by Ignasi Aballí, Antoni Tàpies, Lucio Fontana, Karla Black and Art & Language, which question language and the dialectic of the surface. From its deconstruction, painting is subverted and denied, transforming it into a performatic, conceptual or anti-representational action, until it can be destroyed or be made to disappear.

The following sections explore the transition from the pictorial plane to the space, with works that privilege volume, as in the cellular structures of Absalom or the investigations of a Minimalist nature of Charlotte Posenenske and Rita McBride, among others. The work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Architettura dello Specchio (1990), closes the exhibition. A large mirror divided into four parts and framed with gilded wood, this work reminds us of the paradox of the reflective surface: although it returns all possible images, its ‘transparent’ materiality is deceptively intangible.

Artists in the exhibition: Ignasi Aballí, Absalon, Pep Agut, Art & Language, Karla Black, James Lee Byars, Jordi Colomer, Ángela de la Cruz, Jean Dubuffet, Latifa Echakhch, Lucio Fontana, Dora García, Félix González-Torres, Derek Jarman, Sigalit Landau, Rita McBride, Perejaume, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Charlotte Posenenske, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Doris Salcedo, Gregor Schneider, Antoni Tàpies