Contemporary Realism Art on View:
Realism Now | MEAM Show 2024
A Portrait of the Inner Life of the World
On view through May 30, 2025
Museu Europeu d’Art Modern
https://www.meam.es/
From the organizers:
The MEAM wants to be a home for all those dreams and works of art that allow us to know a little more about who we are. The museum is proud to open the doors of REALISM NOW, an international exhibition that aims to take the pulse of contemporary figurative creation through an attentive selection of top-quality paintings, sculptures and drawings.
It is an exhibition that shows the high level and good health of realism at a global level. As one of the centers for the diffusion of this creative vigor, the MEAM approaches with enthusiasm and pride the immediate future of figuration. This is the first exhibition of a new chapter of the museum, in which we will make an unconditional commitment to the quality and coherence of the exhibitions, and in which we will always put the artists at the center of the equation, turning our location in the center of Barcelona into the home of all figurative artists.
The MEAM is a living institution concerned with attending to all the voices of the figurative world and it will combine the richness of its great art collection with the reception of new works. The museum must always be attentive to the updating of the gaze, to the cultural thermometer, to ideosyncrasies of new order; phenomena that we can observe on canvas, paper and clay. In the same way, we will work to ensure that all branches of figuration, from hyper-realism to expressionism, from surrealism to pure fantasy, have a place on our walls and calendars.
REALISM NOW highlights that there are many angles from which to work the mimesis or artistic transcription of nature. Realism is a plural movement, a territory with as many paths as there are artists who traverse it. But all its expressions, all its aesthetic or conceptual variations refer to a single objective, which is to translate human experience in plastic terms. Tolstoy said that any man is capable of experiencing all human feelings, even if he is not able to express them. Thus, we understand that the mission of creators is to bring before the eyes of the whole world a representation of the experience of living and to translate the state of things by capturing the reality spiced by sensibility and character. That is, to transcribe for everyone the inner life of the world through form and color.
REALISM NOW features very different works. We will see individual and collective portraits, interior and exterior spaces of different kinds, as well as animals and motifs with pronounced iconographies, pieces of furniture and suggestive textiles. However, as usual in figurative exhibitions, the great transversal protagonist of the exhibition is the human body, that infinite source of symbols and connotations. The gesture asks for a grammar that never ends up establishing itself in something fixed and immovable. The language of time and cultures is codified in our gazes and in the way we walk, dance and stand still. Even in those works in which the human figure is absent, through the codes of tradition, we can read details about absent protagonists, about hypothetical observers, about unique characters.
In the eye the truth is concentrated: Who can believe that such a small space contains the images of the whole universe? What language is capable of revealing such a marvel? (da Vinci).
