ALICANTE.- As a result of the collaboration agreement between the IVAM and the Diputación de Alicante, the exhibition Miradas arquitectónicas en la colección del IVAM (Architectonic Views in the Collection of the IVAM) offers an overview of the different and complex ways in which architecture has been represented as an object and sign by an important group of photographers, sculptors and painters since the advent of modernity.

The exhibition comprises 89 works by 50 artists, among which César Domela, Eduard Steichen, Walker Evans, Gabriele Basilico, Equipo Crónica, Miquel Navarro, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ramon de Soto, José Sanleón and Julio Quaresma deserve special mention.

A catalogue has been brought out for the exhibition with reproductions of the works displayed and texts by Consuelo Císcar, Ramón de Soto, Joan Ramon Escrivà, Piedad Solans and José María Torres Nadal.

Art and architecture have undergone a spectacular transformation since the dawn of modernity. During the transformation process, both disciplines have maintained an enriching and important exchange of research and experiments.

Without the contribution of the artistic avant-gardes, it would be hard to understand the development of the new architectonic typologies. Art has also contributed to the development of new sensibilities thanks to the phenomenon of the boundless nuances present in a building.

Because a building is much more than a conjunction of volumes erected to shelter us. Not only people inhabit in its interior, but their belongings, memories, experiences and plans for the future. Buildings are therefore living beings, including those that fall into ruin with the passage of time. Their facades are the skin of a meticulously articulated body, whose shape and presence speak to us about the desires and fears of their architects, promoters and dwellers.

The imagery of ruin occupies an important place in this exhibition. A fundamental metaphor of death, the representation of ruins in art has oscillated between the feeling of nostalgia about the past typical of romanticism and the allegory of the fall of social utopia more in keeping with the disbelieving spirit of our postmodernity.

The radical change in the representation of urban architecture that came about at the beginning of the 20th century with the use of photomontage and collage also occupies a foremost place in this exhibition, along with a fascination for the myths of the functionalist programme and industrial design, whose refined forms embodied for decades the dreams of progress of a civilisation. Some artists’ conception of the house as a space for sheltering madness is nothing but the counterpoint of the hedonism of modern architecture.