CA2M: Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid

24.02.19 – 15.09.19

COLLECTION XVII: CHARLOTTE MOTH.

The walls are fabric, they are part of the fabric. The walls are a fabrication. They are surfaces for projections, trees of life. Temporary structures to transform a space for enhanced perception. They disappear to reveal light. They become a Millefleur or a town hall decor. They are not necessarily pure white. Real constructions that support illusion and imagination, alternative realities. Art is staged within, with and without them.

Walls constitute a cube. They create a context. Brian O’Doherty, New York-based Irish artist and critic, famously wrote about the artificiality of that most common art environment in his series of essays compiled into Inside The White Cube (1976-1981). Walls are also stairwells that wind their way in an experiential animalistic trajectory through architecture. They have roles to play as in a theatrical mise-en-scène. A visit to the Prado. They come to life. Still Life in the White Cube. Nature and artifice intertwine. Strategies of display are at work. Urges are too… to the beat of abstracted bodily actions.

A backdrop painted by Leonor Fini in 1956, Sol LeWitt’s 1989 Untitled gouache and Elmgreen & Dragset’s 2005 series of German Museums – three seemingly unrelated artworks in the collection of Arco and of the Community of Madrid, both in the care of CA2M – have been selected by Charlotte Moth in an associative process which also responds to the materiality of this building and exhibition space.

Caroline Hancock, curator

http://ca2m.org/en/futuras/coleccion-xvii-charlotte-moth