2023-05-19 01:06:05
“Spanish, Franco is dead”. The lapidary phrase that Arias Navarro pronounced in 1975 was the beginning of change in the country. From dictatorship to democracy, from repression to freedom. The time of the Transition it was not just a political change. The foundations of Spanish society trembled with unpredictable transformations in culture, art, demography and forms of thought. ‘Madrid: creative Time.news of the 80s‘ proposes a visual journey through a decade of searching for new narratives, of pushing the limits of possibility. That of a generation that made excess its virtue and that, today, still continues to generate great nostalgia.
The sample, assembled by PhotoESPAÑA, and exhibited at Fundación Canal, combines painting, record covers, books, movie and advertising posters, and emblematic photographs of its cultural, political, and social icons. The 80s were those of ETA, 23-F and the shadow of heroin. But they also saw the birth of Queen Sofia –during its first years an art center and later a museum–, some of the most groundbreaking groups such as Alaska y los Pegamoides, Barón Rojo or Radio Futura, filmmakers such as Almodóvar, and caused the outbreak of the expression of homosexuality with the Pride festivities gay. The Madrid of the 80s was the adoptive city of Andy Warhol or Mapplethorpe, where the influence of his art flooded the advertising posters, the album covers of the moment, and the artistic imaginary of those best valued. The irruption of several of these art legends of the moment fueled the creative fury that overflowed through the streets of Madrid.
Image of the exhibition ‘Madrid: creative Time.news of the 80’
“It is a very ambitious exhibition. It is important to know what Madrid has been and who we are”, defends Ana Berruguete, curator of the exhibition, who explains that the sample is made up of more than 300 works from public and private collections. “The project was born with the desire to commemorate the 40th anniversary of a council that in 1983 obtained its statute and became an Autonomous Community”, he explains while specifying that at that time, the capital was the mirror of social evolution in which all Spain looked. «The creative storm that developed in the capital in the 80s is something more than the Madrid scene», says Berruguete. It was also a time of great population growth, with the challenge that a then very recent political change implies. “The clandestine scene becomes a Madrid hallmark, and is embraced and promoted by the institutions themselves,” says the curator, thanks to the complicity of a Mayor like Enrique Tierno Galván. Berruguete invites us to this revaluation of the memory of an era, with a free and essential exhibition to learn about the modern history of the country.
The social explosion gave rise to an explosion of culture. The icons of the moment are forged in neighborhoods like Malasaña or La Latina, where they live moments of feedback between nights of partying and debauchery. Although in this exhibition there are also references that escape the Movida. “Fashion, television, art exhibitions… We have made a group portrait with everything that marked the 80s,” details the curator, among works by “brave artists” who recovered painting, certainly relegated in previous decades. “The 70s come from more minimalist and conceptual lines that are possibly overshadowed by what came before,” she concludes. Names like a “very young” Miquel Barceló, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, El Hortelano, Ceesepe or Costus (Enrique Naya and Juan Carrero) lead the plastic field, together with cartoonists and cartoonists such as Javier de Juan, Oscar Mariné or Fernando Vicente. There were also those with a talent for music and painting, such as Carlos García Berlanga and Víctor Coyote.
But the clear protagonist of the exhibition is photography. Not only for the value of their authors, as Alberto García-Alix u Ouka Leele, which at that time reinvented some of the standards and gave a new artistic dimension to the snapshot, but also because of the importance of documenting other artists and their works. Furthermore, it is a stage of artistic synergies and incredible collaborations, such as the conceptual jewels by Chus Burés for the film ‘Matador’ (1986) by Pedro Almodovar, the portraits of Alaska and Ana Curra by José Antonio Rojo –a prolific film editor–, urban fashion photographed by Miguel Trillo, his album covers of the moment, Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada collections immortalized by Javier Vallhonrat, García-Alix working for Manuel Piña and Ouke Leele herself with her forays into abstract fashion. Among so much visual convulsion, we also see in the sample a young Chema Madoz taking his first steps.
“We cannot forget these artists who in 1984 dared to make works with lasers, holograms, records and other new languages,” says the curator, referring to experimental creators on the rise in the 1980s such as Marisa González or Antoni Muntadas, inspired by in others of an international order that the Reina Sofía hosted, such as Bill Viola or Marina Abramovic.
When Madrid wanted to be New York
The 80s were a transgressive time in a Spain in which its most traditional clichés coexisted with a stumbling opening towards the rest of the world, which represented modernity. Some ‘memes’ were born, which were not then, but which remain indelible in the Spanish imagination. The collapse of Rumasa and its director, Ruiz-Mateos attacking Miguel Boyer at the exit of a court, shouting “I hit you, milk!” or Enrique Tierno Galván, mayor of Madrid, with his phrase “Rockers, whoever is not stoned should be stoned and to the parrot”. Words such as cubata, sandwich, pasota…
The creation of the fair BOWS by Joan of Aizpuru, “a gallery owner and a woman,” Ana Berruguete points out, “was completely key.” It was time to formalize the cultural explosion, to take it off the streets and make it official in institutions (although for some, like the graffiti artist Muelle, acceptance would come a few years later). The city demanded changes and it was decided to review its aesthetics. By order of the mayor, the famous designer Alberto Corazón made six murals of which only two survive today. In the case of the ‘butcher rooster’, it was the property owners who refused to recover it. In the bars of the scene, music influenced by punk was played and sponsored by creative exploration, looking for new sounds. «The future is already here», sang Radio Futura, which shared with Nacha Pop or Los Secretos the meaning of early references of the Madrid movement.
Dock, next to one of its graffiti at the entrance to the Barley Market
In one of the last rooms of the exhibition, references to the music and cinema of the time are mixed, through the snapshots of the great photographers who portrayed them and the impressive covers that adorned their records. From Miguel Ríos in Seville, where he was named the “most important rock artist of the decade”, to Mecano’s first album. You can also see Miguel Bosé immortalized by Alejandro Cabrera, Radio Futura photographed by Ouka Leele, Alaska and his group by Gorka de Duo, portraits of Gabinete Caligari, La Unión, Obús, Mecano… Those wonderful 80s also provided great television material . We are talking about kinki cinema, about actress Ana Belén, the film ‘El Sur’, by Víctor Erice, and the filmography that Almodovar gave birth to. Not for nothing the Goya Awards They had their first edition in 1987. This decade, the residence of the ‘baby boomers’, never ends to go out of style.
#nostalgic #trip #Madrid #Movida