Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, ??1942) is a nomadic artist who develops his work at street level, closer to life than to museums and institutions. In his work, life and art are part of a whole, as he made clear in one of his famous ideograms (Art-Life). He has no study and his indomitable curiosity about the world keeps him in a kind of constant movement, traveling from Marseille to Shanghai, São Paulo, Puerto Rico or New York, where he has lived since the seventies and teaches classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT). So it is not at all strange that in his new exhibition in Barcelona, ??at the Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery, he receives the visitor with a formidable question (a welcome mat with the inscription …On are you?) that he himself will answer in a latest series designed as a self-portrait: Keep Moving.
Muntadas, who has not exhibited in Barcelona for seven years, has titled this new exhibition Paratopías, a concept coined by the French linguist Dominique Maingueneau and which, transferred to the field of art, alludes to the idea of ??“displacement, travel, uprooting, of the impossibility of belonging, of working in one place coming from another….” At 82 years old, the artist maintains intact the work methodology that he has been developing since his beginnings. They give him an assignment “or I do it”, he lands in a city, contacts a community, creates a team, and from there he begins to delve into the non-obvious, into those intermediate and unexplored spaces that allow him to read unknown codes. writings of social life.
“The actors, the collaborators, the context change, but the methodology always follows me. I don’t go to places, I am in the places, and sometimes works arise or not, ”she explains.
In the new gallery on Méndez Núñez Street, Muntadas brings together historical works such as Reflections on Death, which he presented at the São Paulo Biennial in 1973, a collection of slides of different models of mortuary coffins… “that show how something “As democratic as death, we all die, it ends up becoming something completely classist.” Or his On Translation: The negotiation table II (1985-2005), which he took to the Spanish pavilion in Venice, a semicircular table with legs covered with piles of books, on which he reflects on the production and consumption of culture.
There is also his series City Sentences, in which he reproduced well-known slogans or stereotyped phrases such as España va bien, Tout va bien or Said and done! as posters or billboards. Much more recent, specifically from the spring of 2020, is Closed/Locked, a set of photographs taken in a depopulated New York due to the pandemic, but also due to the Black Lives Matter riots and demonstrations that caused a protection effect. and self-confinement. “I used to cover them up, when you could only go out for food or to the pharmacy, but in the end the police turned a blind eye, they already knew me,” she remembers.
The exhibition has an extension in the gallery’s warehouse (the former Espai Poblenou, by appointment), where among boxes and junk it projects videographic works based on images by Joris Ivens, Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord.
