The exhibition “Order and disorder in the world. Banco Sabadell Art Collection / Sabadell Art Museum” brings two of the city’s most prominent art collections together for the first time: on one hand, the Sabadell Art Museum, which mainly has artworks by local artists, and on the other, the Banco Sabadell Art Collection, which includes artworks not only by renowned creators from Sabadell but also by national and international artists.

The exhibition, curated by Alexandra Laudo [Heroínas de la Cultura], contains a large selection of modern and contemporary artworks that showcase how art has been linked to humankind’s desire to understand the external sensible world, to interpret and define it and how, at the same time, humankind has also sought to question, subvert, go beyond and reinvent the concept of order and the principle of systematisation that have been used by the various academic disciplines in an attempt to gain knowledge about the world and existence.

Modern art broke with the traditional views of the West, providing a transformative vision of reality and of the innermost and invisible manifestations, expanding the range of what can be represented in art. Contemporary art has integrated and extended this drive to break with tradition, this mission to disrupt and destabilise the stable and functional categories that the hegemonic powers so often use to define the world and existence.

The exhibition makes us a part of that movement and invites us to see how, through their work, artists have approached the key concepts and ideas about knowledge and human experience, such as nothingness, matter, origins, existence, nature, landscape, creation and destruction. The selection of artworks also emphasises the nature of the link forged between art and reality and invites viewers to reflect on the meaning and value of the works on display, on imagination and on creation. It also explores the relationship between artistic creativity and desire, understood as a creative force that destabilises and disrupts the established order.

“Order and disorder in the world” invites us to understand art as a creative destruction, as a creation that destroys.