MAC LIMA COLLECTION: RESEARCH, CONSERVATION AND EXHIBITION

The MAC Lima is responsible for researching and disseminating the artistic, historical and patrimonial importance of this collection and fulfilling the mission of making it visible to different audiences. The history of this collection has its beginnings in the activities of the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo (IAC), which was founded in Lima in 1955, thanks to the meeting of a group of entrepreneurs, intellectuals and philanthropists with the vision of creating a space for the most current and cosmopolitan artistic manifestations.

The IAC received as a donation some of the works of the important artists who exhibited in those first decades of operation. Subsequently, the project to build a contemporary art museum to house this collection was consolidated. In 1999, a group of prominent Latin American artists donated works to the IAC to expand its collection, organize an auction and raise funds for the construction of the future museum. In 2013 the doors of the MAC Lima in Barranco opened. Since then, its collection has been enriched with the entry of works in donation and on loan that complement the contemporary panorama.

This exhibition is part of a larger program of research, conservation and exhibition of the MAC Lima Collection, which has included the publication of a book and a virtual archive on the activities of the IAC and on some of the works in the collection. In this way, the team has been able to identify each work with greater precision, its production contexts and its history linked to the IAC and the Museum.

The exhibition includes a corpus organized around fundamental axes in the history and present of the arts in Peru, such as: the integration of Latin American art, the dialogue and exchanges with Europe in the context of the avant-garde, the relationship between indigenism and modernity, and the reelaborations and appropriations of mythical references or visual resources of the pre-Columbian imaginary, testimonies of the violence and crises of our nations. This is not a definitive selection and pieces of indisputable artistic value remain in the deposits. This selection offers an overview of how the category of "contemporary art" was understood from the IAC, and more recently from MAC Lima, in order to stand firmly in the present, question its limits and understand the demands that these works place on us as spectators. The exhibition explores how contemporary art, that of today as well as that of seventy years ago, is capable of producing a new sensibility in us when we stop in front of it and force ourselves to listen to what it wants to tell us.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Mariella Agois, Miguel Aguirre, Herman Braun-Vega, Alberto Casari, Claudia Coca, César Cornejo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alfredo Da Silva, Olga De Amaral, Elda Di Malio, Gastón Garreaud, Beatriz González, Ricardo Grau, Arcangelo Ianelli, Wilfredo Lam, Siegfried Laske, Ramiro Llona, Eduardo Moll, Víctor Pasmore, Luis Fernando Peláez, Rogelio Polesello, Sonia Prager, Alberto Quintanilla, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Edith Sachs, Kazuya Sakai, Josué Sánchez, Marianna Schmidt, Venancio Shinki, Fernando de Szyszlo, Mario Urteaga, Armando Varela, Kukuli Velarde, Armando Villegas, Judith Westphalen, Adja Yunkers.