Wed Mar 03, 2010 00:00 - Sun Feb 28, 2010

Spain

The setting of the bed and its icons furnishes us with many examples in the history of art, literature and the cinema. The portrait and elements of allegory, tragedy, the assault on intimacy, psychoanalysis and childhood memories all use the metaphor of the bed as a vehicle for the introduction of new narratives. And the priority given by some forms of contemporary art to everyday life in recent decades has produced formulas that make use of settings in real houses, construct installations or objects that offer allusions to the home or recreate rooms that permit evocative or autobiographical effects. As the heart of this map of intimacy, the bed is an icon of individual and collective reality that provides the base on which to construct the discourse of this exhibition, A piel de cama. Miradas sobre un espacio cotidiano (Between the sheets. Ways of looking at an everyday setting).

The bed has virtually become an instrument of ritual, accompanying us from the first moments of our existence as a witness that observes the materialisation of human actions and feelings. The selection of works and artists presented in this project allows us to analyse the many different scenarios that we establish in bed in the course of a lifetime. Momentous experiences such as birth and death, sex, illness, dreams, love, travel, work or reflection have caught the attention of the artists who are presented here, prompting them to make the bed a symbol that gives structure and cohesion to many of their works. Antoni Tàpies, Louise Bourgeois, Darío Villalba, Guillermo Kuitca, Mateo Maté, Eulàlia Valldosera, Montserrat Soto, Gilberto Zorio, Manuel Bouzo, Enrique Marty, Manuel Borrego, Cristina Lucas and Alberto García-Alix compose a sequence of images that reveal original readings relating to the bed, seen on a variety of media in the setting of the Sala Parpalló. In this process of reflection we have included views from the perspectives of films and philosophy, in the essays by Pilar Pedraza and David Pérez that accompany the catalogue. A series of films featuring the bed as object and setting will be shown during the exhibition, under the direction of Áurea Ortiz.

Associated with a sense of shelter, the bed takes us back to that primary place of protection, the mother’s womb; yet when it is established in a physical setting it can express the purest essence of the human being. A piel de cama invites us to take a fresh look at what seems to have been seen a thousand times before, and to recognise a substantial part of our history in its simplest and most ordinary dimension..