Artist: Adolfo Schlosser, Alfonso Albacete, Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Franco, Chema Cobo, Eva Lootz, Luís Gordillo, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, Javier Utray, José Guerrero, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Manolo Quejido, Miguel Ángel Campano, Mitsuo Miura, Nacho Criado, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Santiago Serrano, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina
Dates: April 02nd 2022 to May 28th 2022

The exhibition Un bosque interesante (“An Interesting Forest”), curated by Mariano Navarro, establishes points of connection between Navarro’s profession as an art critic and curator and the germinal moment in which this future critic/curator first came into contact with the world of contemporary art and became aware of two things. Firstly, the conceptual importance of contemporary art. And secondly, that the works of the artists who were bursting onto the Madrid art scene represented transcendence for the practice of art.

In Navarro’s case, the phenomenon occurred at the beginning of the 1970s, initially through seeing their work and very soon afterwards by getting to know several of the artists active on the precarious Madrid scene at the time.

Un bosque interesante is an intimate exhibition that in no way claims to describe the Spanish art scene of that decade, but rather, in a much more modest way, acknowledges the debt owed by the curator to a specific group of artists active in Madrid. Thanks to this group, Navarro “discovered” the value of the art of his time and the implications that this had for everyday life.

It is important to point out that the works on display – the vast majority of which, faithfully preserved since the 1970s, come from the artists’ own collections – have not been selected at random. On the contrary, they are originals, sketches or pieces closely related to larger-format works which defined a specific moment and certain methods of creation, and which resulted in a profound transformation of the art scene in Madrid, and indeed in Spain as a whole.

Equally relevant is the age of these works, most of which date from the early 1970s – prior to the death of the dictator and completely independent of the political changes this unleashed – up to approximately 1978, when the Spanish people voted for the Constitution that is still in force today. These dates are relevant because by bringing together these different works, the curator has reaffirmed his conviction that the decade in which a new aesthetic paradigm was formulated, laying the foundations of what has become contemporary art in Spain, was the early 1970s and not the 1980s, in which the dominant historiography has sought to see a novelty that was merely sociological, not artistic.

The exhibition is entitled Un bosque interesante because there was something lush and wild about the singular world that these artists were creating with their experiential artistic proposals. The artists included in the exhibition are José Guerrero, Luis Gordillo, Alfredo Alcaín, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Nacho Criado, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, Santiago Serrano, Manolo Quejido, Rafael Pérez Minguez, Carlos Alcolea, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Carlos Franco, Javier Utray, Eva Lootz, Adolfo Schlosser, Mitsuo Miura, Luis M. Muro, Chema Cobo, Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Juan Manuel Bonet, Luis Muro and Rafael Pérez Mínguez.

With the sad exceptions of José Guerrero, Nacho Criado, Carlos Alcolea, Javier Utray, Adolfo Schlosser, Miguel Ángel Campano and Rafael Pérez Mínguez, who have passed away, it should be noted that all of these artists are still active, authors of works every bit as powerful as those of their early years and which still retain their importance in contemporary art today.