Over the two past decades the city of Barcelona has become a point of reference for cultural tourism. The intense activity in the spheres of art and of town planning, and particularly the opening of new art centres and the modernisation of existing museums, alongside the growth of the city’s sculptural heritage have proven to be decisive factors. This new collection of trilingual pocket guides comprising exhaustive updated documentation is introduced by the volumes dedicated to museums, foundations and exhibition halls, and to the sculptures designed for public spaces by some of the most outstanding twentieth-century artists, including Baumgarten, Calder, Chillida, Gargallo, Merz, Miró, Tàpies, Turrell...

Via a discourse structured around images, texts and even a topographical map of Folgueroles, Perejaume pays joint homage to Jacint Verdaguer, Antoni Gaudí and Joan Maragall, three cultural summits from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with very different attitudes to nature (the true protagonist of the book). Although published more recently, this work is a clear precedent to El Pirineu de Baix (The Lower Pyrenees, 1997), devoted to Joan Miró.

Over the two past decades the city of Barcelona has become a point of reference for cultural tourism. The intense activity in the spheres of art and of town planning, and particularly the opening of new art centres and the modernisation of existing museums, alongside the growth of the city’s sculptural heritage have proven to be decisive factors. This new collection of trilingual pocket guides comprising exhaustive updated documentation is introduced by the volumes dedicated to museums, foundations and exhibition halls, and to the sculptures designed for public spaces by some of the most outstanding twentieth-century artists, including Baumgarten, Calder, Chillida, Gargallo, Merz, Miró, Tàpies, Turrell…

Footmarks and handprints, sand, wood, earth, rope, words and letters: Tàpies, repertoire is infinite. Miró encouraged him to use forms and materials of every kind, all the more so in an environment devoid of meaning-Spain in the post-war years-in which official reality bore no relation to the situation as it really was. Imperceptibly, true reality asserted its pre-eminence and the expressiveness of increasingly organic materials, endowing his painting with greater materiality than signification.

The public works of Eduardo Chillida, present in numerous cities in the world, figure among the most intense and telling creations of contemporary monumental-scale sculpture.
  In most cases, these works involve architectural, urban or landscape aspects, and the problem that the artist must face is the organization of the works in the space, whether in relation to the external environment in which the work is placed –– as in Wind Combs, in struggle with the aggressive Cantabrian Sea; in the idyllic peace of the Gure Aitaren Etxea (House of our Fathers), in Guernica; or in the Eulogy to the Horizon, in Gijón ––, or to interior space, closed and sometimes hermetic, which for the artist has a value that is both stimulating and creative.
  Throughout his essay, Giovanni Carandente analyzes, in addition to the artistic, stylistic and environmental aspects, the profound ethical implications of Chillida's work; from steles dedicated to intellectuals, thinkers and friends, to tributes in recognition of poets and artists –– from Goethe and Khayyam to Hokusai and Miró.

  This volume also includes a wide selection of the Basque artist's writings that bring us closer to his desire to "define the hollow three-dimensional through the full three-dimensional, establishing at the same time a kind of dialogue between them ... The dialogue between the forms, whatever they may be, are much more important than the forms themselves.”

Photographs by David Finn
Remarks on Works by Dena Merriam

CO-PUBLISHED WITH HAUSER AND WIRTH PUBLISHERS

>> Giovanni Carandente(1920-2009) has been one of the most renowned specialists in contemporary sculpture. From his influential exhibition Sculpture in the City, in 1962, in Spoleto, he curated important exhibitions on Picasso, Moore and Calder.

>> David Finnis a photographer with a career focused on the art world, from ancient Egypt to classical Greece, through the main protagonists of the Renaissance –– Donatello, Miguel Angel –– and modern sculpture.