SHANGHAI.- The exhibition that
IVAM has devoted to Alberto Corazón covers his production from the end of the sixties until today, and includes a selection of 30 art pieces, paintings, sculptures and conceptual art. Considered as one of the pioneers in Spanish conceptual art, the exhibition revisits the works recently donated by the artist to the IVAM collection.
From his beginnings, Alberto Corazón combined artistic production with his professional activity first as a graphic designer, and later as an industrial designer. He is certainly one of the most innovative and influential figures in our country. Transfers from theoretical approach and formal resources between design and creative activity have been constant in his production, characterised by self-reflection and interdisciplinary knowledge integration. The exhibition catalogue reproduces part of the works displayed and it includes texts by Consuelo Císcar, Pilar Parcerisas and Fernando Gómez Aguilera.
Painter, sculptor and designer, Alberto Corazón (Madrid, 1942) studied Sociology and Economics between 1960 and 1965. When he finished his university studies, which he carried out while learning drawing and painting, he founded the publishing company Ciencia Nueva with a group of friends and started his professional career as a designer. At the same time he had his first painting exhibitions in Turin and Milan.
In the first half of the seventies, Alberto Corazón developed a series of dematerialised art connected to the abundance of images produced by the emerging media society, supported by new opportunities in mechanical reproduction and mass consumption. Corazón takes mass media icons as a starting point, reelaborating them with a particular and expressive vocabulary in the laboratory –he emphasises wefts and lines, shows positive-negative contrasts, integrates text and photography…- while conceptualising visual content from the theories provided by semiological studies and communication and information theories.
Corazón's contribution to Spanish culture which, during Franco times struggled to open resistance and democratic awareness channels, was presented not just in his art but also in publishing, production and transmission of knowledge initiatives, connected to new artistic practices. In that sense, his publishing projects, Ciencia Nueva and Alberto Corazón Editor-Comunicación, represent two collective and very influential contributions promoted by this artist and designer from Madrid as a way of building a modern and democratic society. In his graphical works, which were unique at that time, he applied linguistic formulae from his conceptual research, while his publishing company provided progressive and humanistic, social and political content, unpublished in Spain.
The eighties were not a prolific period for the artist, who put an end to this conceptual crisis with a come back to his profession as a designer. In 1992, Corazón returned to the art scene with the exhibition Estrategias del agrimensor, where he displayed sculptures and paintings following an emblematic style, with expressionism roots, based on schematic and primitive drawings.
His recent work is a continuation of his perception and iconography approach, while, within the context of educated painting, he focused on composition problems closely linked to the iconic identity of gender and its understanding. His latest still-life paintings showed effusiveness of colour and freedom in the figures. Mediterranean and hedonistic, this most recent work points to the creation of a strictly pictorial space, typical of paintings, suggesting features of innocence and happiness.
