"New Realism and other Concepts" at the Richard Vanderaa Gallery

The Richard Vanderaa gallery presents, from September 8, the exhibition New Realism and other Concepts with works of Catalan Nouveau Réalisme by some of the leading artists of conceptual art in Catalonia. New Realism - Nouveau Réalisme, a movement promoted by the critic Pierre Restany (Els Banys d'Artes i Palada, 1930-2003) - was a current with clear parallels with Pop-Art, with which it coexisted, but very more European In fact, much more French, reflecting the dark side of capitalism' when Pop showed the brighter and brighter side.

In Catalonia, entering the sixties, one of the first to go in this direction was Jordi Galí (Barcelona, 1944), and shortly after Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, 1942), Joan Rabascall (Barcelona, 1935) and Jaume Xifra ( Salt, 1934 – Paris, 2014).

At the end of the sixties, Pere Noguera began to experiment with the precursor of the photocopier, making monotypes that a few years later resulted in the iconic series of photocopies, exhibited in the Sala Vinçon. Guillem Rubió, influenced by 'everything that Muntadas did', but especially by the 'accumulations' of the French artist Arman, the greatest representative of Nouveau Réalisme, builds in the early seventies, a series of accumulations of objects through assembly and collage, subjected to the aesthetics of waste, with a certain machinism, similar to industrial processes. His original and aesthetically correct interpretation of New Realism is placed with this work within the new wave of artists in Catalonia who explored new paths in the seventies, such as Jordi Cerdà and Carles Pujol, taking over from the conceptualists who left in the abroad, Muntadas and Miralda in New York and Rabascall and Xifra in Paris.

The exhibition can be visited until October 14, 2022.