Most of the works displayed by the Museum in the scripts of the long-term exhibitions and the permanent halls are paintings. For those who are not familiar with the Museum’s overall collection, this proportion could be misleading, since the total number of paintings does not exceed the drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, video recordings, action and performance art documentation, soundscapes, documents, historical objects and pre-Columbian pieces. There is no doubt that the prominence of painting, which for centuries remained a vehicle to deposit many of the ideas and images that accompanied Western tradition and history, privileged a visual-centered aesthetic which in some cases overshadowed many possibilities of the sensitive scope and the artistic expression, at least when it comes to what many museums exhibit and the way they privilege the “masterpieces”.
In the interest of propelling an increasingly critical and contemporary Museum, the prominence of painting is challenged by the need to connect visitors with new experiences and ideas through the variety and range of formats available in contemporary artistic practices. To that end, printmaking plays an active and decisive role in the Museum; its presence reinforces many ideas addressed in our exhibitions by way of the dialogue and the thematic or formal associations between objects that do not always share a common time, format or technique.
The result is a selection of works that shape and weave contexts that go beyond their limits as mere objects, leaving aside modern categories such as “painting room” or “sculpture room”, so common in museums that are meant to exhibit art histories or the heritage and memory of a given culture. Prints are not exhibited as such at the Museum, but as part of the ideas that we propose to our visitors, by doing that it is possible to find determinant critical prints in non-subordinate situations in the The Persistence of Dogma, Stories to Rethink, Promises of Modernity and the Sophia Vari International Hall exhibition rooms.
The main hall of this exhibition, dedicated to providing a background of the printmaking practices in Antioquia and the first artists who approached printmaking as the main medium of artistic expression in the mid-twentieth century, is a scale-down replica of the discourse and the ideas displayed by the Museum in its nineteenth and twentieth century rooms, with the singularity and the power of printmaking, laying out a state of affairs that let us understand in part, what was the context of the construction and development of modernity in this region, in the beginning as dissemination of knowledge with a civilizing purpose, and later as testimony of a tumultuous period when artists such as Aníbal Gil, Carlos Correa and Augusto Rendón ventured into the field of printmaking; that period had the Violence in Colombia, the National Front and the Cold War as a core; two prints by José Guadalupe Posada connects us with the wider Latin American context, where for more than a century, the graphic arts have been a possibility of expression, protest and political satire.
Curatorship
Museo de Antioquia
