MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: ART AND MEDICINE, AN AMALGAM OF TWO AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE
With one foot on science and the other on art, Libia Posada's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, inaugurated in early March, almost seems to have anticipated the catastrophic arrival of Covid-19 in America.
Libia Posada. Definición del horizonte (Definition of the Horizon)
From the series Revisión (Reviews)
The exhibition Libia Posada. Definition of the Horizon is a journey through around 20 years of career of this important Antioquia artist trained as a doctor and also as an artist, disciplines in which she operates in parallel. From the beginning, her projects have been located at the intersection between these two types of knowledge, which is none other than the body, its different representations and the ways in which it is built and shaped by culture. For this reason, the work of Libia Posada shows the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary artistic practices that have the ability to dilute the borders between art and other cultural and social practices.
The work of Libia Posada (Medellín, 1959) arises from the crossing of medicine and art, two disciplines in which she was formally educated. The synthesis of both, through different techniques, represents not only a questioning of the models of thought and action of each one but, above all, a way of thinking, questioning or resisting. It is about debating the models to which we are subject as social beings and about the behaviors that predetermine our experience in the world: being a man or a woman, being born and raised in a certain context, opting for art or science ... and also of those who prescribe what is normal or abnormal, who is sane and who is not, who is healthy or ill.
Through the use of furniture, instruments, texts, materials and images typical of the medical repertoire, the artist proposes reflections on a body that transcends the limits of the individual and is inserted in the field of the collective and the social. In addition to medicine, cartography also constitutes a privileged universe that the artist uses to think about the world around us. Thus, the elements of the maps become tools for interpreting and questioning the life experience and the social and political environment.
However, the works gathered in this exhibition do not seek to determine the state of health or pathology of society, nor the exact geographical characteristics of the country, rather they seek to rethink the signs that supposedly verify each of those health states and their psychosocial conditions. In this way, Posada, through languages as diverse as painting, installation, drawing, photography and group actions or video, has created a body of work that speaks of the ways in which the body, the individual and the collective, are defined, tamed and modified by the culture.
Libia Posada. Definition of the Horizon is the first anthological exhibition of this Antioquia artist and seeks to give an overview of her artistic production, from the paintings of the nineties –among which Definition of the Horizon (1998) from which this show takes its name– stands out - to her more recent projects, including her concern with the role of women in society, community building, and the weight of rational thought. This exhibition is part of the Revisiones (Reviews) series, a segment of MAMM programming started in 2016 with the aim of making the work of mid-career Colombian artists more known.
CLICK HERE FOR A 360 VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION
Next, an analysis of the work Materia gris (Gray Matter), part of the exhibition
