Salto de página. El libro de artista en el siglo XXI. Calcografía Nacional (Madrid)
05.04.2017 - 14.05.2017
National Engraving Gallery. Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Madrid
‘An artist's book is a book made by an artist’
Marcel Duchamp
Putting this premise into practice, in the second half of the twentieth century, specifically in 1963, the American artist Edward Ruscha produced the first edition of his celebrated Twentysix Gasoline Stations. From then on, the most avant-garde artists chose to use the book as a means of breaking away from previous artistic traditions.
This conception has endured to the present day and remains one of the fundamental legacies of the 1960s. The distinctive nature of these books lies in their innovative spirit and in their conception as works of art, recognising the book as an artistic entity in its own right and establishing an independent genre, just as painting, sculpture and video had previously done.
Books and publications by national and international artists form part of the Banco Sabadell Collection, which over the past four years has been enriched through the sponsorship of the ARTSLIBRIS-Banco Sabadell Prize, dedicated to the acquisition of publications. The exhibition brings together the prize-winning works from these years, along with other works from the Banco Sabadell Art Collection.
The exhibition is organised into five thematic sections: historical reference, the artist's book, contemporary bibliophily, the poetics of the book-object and the photobook. Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, Jannis Kounellis, Jaume Plensa, José Pedro Croft and Pablo Palazuelo enter into dialogue with the work of numerous younger artists such as Cristina de Middel, Sandra Gamarra and Simona Rota.
As a tribute to the Spanish National Engraving Gallery, the publication Insult to Injury by the British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman has been included. The work takes as its starting point Francisco de Goya's series of prints The Disasters of War.
The book, as a work of art, is the creative territory explored by this exhibition, although many contemporary artists' books extend beyond the boundaries imposed by the format: they expand to embrace the boundless territory of art. For this reason, many of these books, and especially the photobooks featured in the exhibition, form part of a broader whole, a series, installation or projection that continues onto the gallery walls through works by Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Palazuelo, Jordi Colomer and Equipo Crónica, among others.
Sol LeWitt defined artists' books as a means of conveying ideas. This is the new space of the book in the twenty-first century: boundless, inclusive of every discipline, and a space of freedom in which all art finds expression.
