Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

As part of the exhibition Critical Episodes (1957-2011). MACBA Collection, Level 2 of the Museum presents two new episodes of the MACBA Collection. Fissures, the first episode on this floor, deals with forms of subjectivity that are often silenced and forgotten. The representation of the world through cognitive maps reflecting the way we order our knowledge and the stories we tell in order to synthesise these experiences, have become material of the first order in contemporary art. In the sixties, a generation of artists rejected ten years later everything they had learned in their primary and secondary education. Punk’s typically irreverent attitude contaminated an artistic practice that was deeply critical of any institution that promotes disciplined individuals.

Fragment, silence and disorder are part of how we construct ourselves as subjects. Artists such as Erick Beltrán, Anne-Lise Coste, Peter Friedl, Sílvia Gubern, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Raymond Pettibon and Oriol Vilapuig show some of the fundamental fissures in contemporary subjects. Through their work, they question the processes of learning and the inner social models.

MACBA will be closed on 25 December and 1 January