Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was part of the group of young artists who, at the end of the sixties, in the midst of the turmoil caused by the Vietnam War and inspired by the space race that invited them to imagine other worlds, abandoned museums and galleries and began to make monumental installations in the desert landscapes of the American Southwest. A movement made up mainly of men (with shining stars such as Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria…) but in which women also left their mark, although history has relegated them to the role of mere companions. A paradigmatic case is that of Holt, creator of one of her most personal and poetic works, to which the Macba dedicates an exhibition, Inside Outside, which aims to correct this anomaly (until January 7).
Nancy Holt maintained her artistic practice through almost half a century, until her death at age 75 from leukemia, and is the author of fascinating works such as Sun tunnels (1976) in the desert of the Great Basin of Utah: four long concrete tubes that align with sunrise and sunset during the summer and winter solstices. The top of each cylinder is perforated so that, during the day, sunlight casts tiny constellations onto the tubes. However, for many she was only the companion of Robert Smithson, who died at the age of 35 in a plane crash in 1973 while looking for a place to work in Texas. From then on, the artist combined her work with caring for her husband’s legacy. At her request, the Holt Smithson Foundation was created, which has had a decisive collaboration in the Macba exhibition together with the University of Umeå (Sweden).
“She is a fundamental artist because she shows us that art is important. How does she get it? She asks us to look and look again. In all of her work there is always the same question: What do you see? No, seriously, what do you see? And without a doubt this is one of the most politically committed questions that any of us can ask right now. What do we see from our place in the world. And yet she is not at the center of art history. The reason? Like so many others, she was a woman artist, ”says Lisa Le Feuvre, one of the people in charge of the foundation and curator of the exhibition together with Katarina Pierre and Teresa Grandas.
Beyond the labels (land art, conceptual art…), Holt was trained as a biologist and considered herself an “artist of perception”, emphasizes Grandas. The title of the show refers to a 1972 exhibition in which Views through a sand dune was a part, a work that according to the curator contains some of the elements present in all of her work. “The certainty of the point of view but also the uncertainty of vision and the mutability of perception. Positioning ourselves is not merely a physical or spatial issue, but also a political one, how we position ourselves as individuals”, sums up the curator, who has designed a journey through her entire career, from her first concrete poems to films, drawings, spatial sculptures, photographs. .. through which, concludes the director of MACBA, Elvira Dyangani Ose, “invites us to think about the present from what Perec calls the infraordinary and that escape our gaze.”
