Eugènia Balcells
Boy Meets Girl
1978
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Women Pop Artists in the Collection
Among the bequest received from the old MEAC (Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art) there are significant works from women artists from the 1960s and 1970s, largely incorporated into the Collection as independent pieces, and ones that do not necessarily serve to build a discourse or become an exhaustive representation of the careers of each artist. The need to expand beyond this collection to create a narrative that articulates artists and works with the different art groups and movements was the catalyst behind a new acquisitions policy started from 2008 and set up to research, locate and incorporate these pieces into the institution’s holdings.
The presence of feminism already at the base of this new discourse has intensified in the Collection through the incorporation of manifold artistic manifestations: visual works, magazines, photographs, performances, videos, etc. Moreover, this has added richness to the readings which, rooted in art-related aspects, cross-over with issues of a sociocultural nature.
Paz Muro, The Cultural Influence, and Nothing More than Cultural, of Women in Architecture, Visual and Other Arts, 1975
In rotation and in different contexts, the works, acquired by the Museo between 2008 and 2013, of different women artists have been displayed, for instance Eugènia Balcells, Esther Ferrer, Eulalia Grau, Concha Jerez, Eva Lootz, Fina Miralles, Paz Muro and Àngels Ribé, who are linked to feminist protest and concerned with early experiences of performance and experimental art in Spain.
The research into humanist photography and the Afal Group has also triggered a major acquisition of works by women artists working with documentary photography like Colita, present in the Museo since 2011, and Pilar Aymerich and Ana Turbau, whose works were incorporated in 2018 and framed in the context of the show The Poetics of Democracy. The three photographers have thus become exponents of the relevance of women at once as witnesses and driving forces of change.
In 2010 a major set of works by the group Estampa Popular became part of the Collection, through acquisitions and donations, and represent women artists with a critical purposefulness that railed against the virtues of the Franco regime. Among them were Esther Boix and Ana Peters, the latter linked to the Estampa Popular group from Valencia, the origin of groups historically embedded in Pop Art.
Mari Chordà. Volcà (Volcano), 1973
Indeed, the Pop Art orbit and its female representatives in the Collection were only made up of works hailing from MEAC, as was the case with Isabel Villar, giving rise to one of the recurrent lines of research to enhance the holdings and materialising in a significant ensemble of works and their mise en scène in two of the Collection’s rooms. Pieces by Mari Chordà, Ángela García Codoñer and Isabel Oliver, se han sumado entre 2017 and 2019 became additions in 2017 and 2019 to female artists whose practices flowed between mass media culture and conceptual art, such as Eugènia Balcells and Eulàlia Grau. Also as part of the same discourse, Cecilia Bartolomé's film Margarita y el lobo (Margarita and the Wolf, 1969), a loan from Filmoteca Española, is also on view. All of these artists share the interests of that generation in art as a vehicle for granting visibility to the feminist protests that would shape these two decades.
Eugènia Balcells
Eugènia Balcells ironically uses images of men and women in the mass media in Boy Meets Girl and Fin (End), both from 1978. Her choice to work with reproducible, less durable and light media compared to traditional mediums like screen printing and video sometimes coincided with displays in non-artistic settings.
Mari Chordà
Mari Chordà produced, between 1966 and 1967, the series of pieces titled Vaginals, which set forth a representation of the female body and sexuality that was extraneous to voyeurism. Confronting imagery bolstered in the media, women artists put forward new iconographies of the female body, spotlighting their tactility and place of enunciation.
Ángela García Codoñer
Ángela García Codoñer translates pleasure and enjoyment in relation to the body in en Divertimento (Entertainment, 1973) and Teta Pop (Tit Pop,1973). The artist shuns female stereotypes around being beautiful, submissive, lightweight or inferior, rejecting patriarchy-projected fantasies. The cuts and alterations of these figures were marked by rage, trauma and by an attitude of self-defence with respect to the professional and artistic scene in which she attempted to survive, and to her immediate family environment.
Eulàlia Grau
In Temps de Lleure. Etnografia (Leisure Time. Ethnography, link to PDF [in Spanish]), Eulàlia Grau explores the role of men and women through mass-media imagery, contrasting them and revealing not only restrictive stereotypes for both sexes, but the fact that their bodies, moulded from strict canons, were presented to be consumed. She denounced the discrimination of women, drawing from images of beauty and submissiveness that pervaded magazines and advertising, from which she appropriated through formulas tied to photomontage in order to recontextualise it in settings related to the daily life of most Spanish women, for instance in Discriminació de la dona (The Discrimination of Women, 1977).
Isabel Oliver
Opposite the discourse from the women’s branch of the Falange, Isabel Oliver executed a series of feminist paintings, La mujer (Women, 1970–1971), at the start of the 1970s. Perhaps the artist to bear the closest relation, stylistically, to the Valencian Pop Art of Equipo Crónica, in her work she criticised, using irony, the dearth of feminist awareness among the majority of Spanish women, an example of which is Feliz reunión (Happy Meeting, 1971), and explored the alienation suffered upon trying to reach the sublimated image disseminated from the mass media.
Ana Peters
The Ana Peters exhibition titled La imagen de la mujer en la sociedad de consumo (The Image of Women in Consumer Society, link to PDF [in Spanish]) was held in 1966 in the Edurne Gallery in Madrid. With a Pop Art language inspired by the works of Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rauschenberg, she questioned stereotypes of female representation in the context of the society from that time, marked by consumerism and the mass media. She would use the same Pop Art language in her involvement in different collective projects inside the Estampa Popular group in Valencia.
Pilar Aymerich
Salient in the work of Pilar Aymerich are her documentary photographs and collaboration with politically and socially committed mediums, contributing in a major way to the resistance culture and protests in the Late Francoism period. Her photographs of feminist demonstrations, the Jornades Catalanes de la Dona (Catalan Women’s Days, 1976) and the life of female prisoners bear witness to her role in the feminist movement in the 1970s.
Colita
The photobook Antifémina (Anti-Female, link to PDF [in Spanish]) (1977) resulted from the joint work of photographer Colita and writer Maria Aurèlia Capmany, who both set out to conduct a critical revision of situations in which Spanish women found themselves and called for vindication in issues related to old age, marriage, work, religion, prostitution, marginalisation, sexuality and publicity. Both wanted to do everything possible to grant rights to women of all stripes and from every social stratum, demonstrating their non-conformity with regard to normalised customs and granting visibility to women who did not fall within the female stereotype created from sexism.
