JAVIER UTRAY AND NACHO CRIADO AT CENTRO DE ARTE DOS DE MAYO
The Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) is preparing to open two solo exhibitions dedicated to two fundamental Spanish artists of the second half of the 20th century. Javier Utra. Un retrato anamórfico (Javier Utray. An anamorphic portrait) and Nacho Criado. No es la voz que clama en el desierto (Nacho Criado. Not the voice crying in the desert) open their doors to the public on Thursday 25 March and will remain at the museum until 11 July.
Both exhibitions are part of the reconfiguration of the history of contemporary art in Spain, its precedents and the continuation of the cultural scene based on the figure of fundamental artists of the 20th century.
Javier Utray. Un retrato anamórfico
Curated by Mariano Navarro and Andrés Mengs, the exhibition dedicated to Javier Utray (Madrid, 1945-2008) is conceived as a tribute to the artist in all his facets - architect, writer, visual artist, musician, performer and agitator - with the aim of vindicating the importance of his person within the Spanish cultural scene from the 1960s onwards.
To this end, the exhibition has been conceived along four axes. In the first, the viewer is invited to explore
Utray's architectural work, given that this was his language of artistic expression. Although most of his projects were never materialised, the exhibition focuses on the originality of his ideas.
The second part was designed by Navarro and Mengs to show Utray's insertion into the cultural scene of the time. In this section, the Madrid artist's works are in dialogue with works by Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Franco, Santiago Serrano, Nacho Criado and Chema Cobo, among others, as well as his profound artistic relationship with Marcel Duchamp.
The last two stages are a journey through his publishing and plastic work. In the first case, centred on the 1980s, where Utray's participation in projects such as La Luna de Madrid, Sur Express, El Paseante and El Europeo were fundamental. The second focuses on his artistic production from the 1980s until his death in 2008.
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"Utray con Duchamp", 1984. Ph: Javier Campano.
Nacho Criado. No es la voz que clama en el desierto
The exhibition of Nacho Criado (Megíbar, 1943-Madrid, 2010), on the other hand, consists of a single piece: Espacio de interferencias. Presented in 1990 by the curator and art historian Javier Maderuelo for the Círculo de Bellas Artes, the work was then presented alongside the work of other artists such as Darío Corbeira, Marcelo Expósito, Francisco Felipe, Gabriel Fernández Corchero, Juan Hidalgo, Concha Jerez, Eva Lootz, Sara Rosenberg, Adolfo Schlosser and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. The relevance of this work is, precisely, the objectives of the exhibition curated by Maderuelo: "To present the current state of aesthetic ideas".
In that exhibition in the 1990s, an intergenerational group of artists gave an account of the expressive value of installation as an artistic language, positioning it within the catalogue of the plastic arts.
