Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought. CaixaForum Barcelona

We map our world in order to gain a glimpse of the reality in which we live. Since time immemorial, maps have been used to represent, translate and encode all kinds of physical, mental and emotional territories. Our representation of the world has evolved in recent centuries and, today, with globalisation and the Internet, traditional concepts of time and space, along with methods for representing the world and knowledge, have been definitively transformed. In response to this paradigm shift, contemporary artists question systems of representation and suggest new formulas for classifying reality.

The ultimate aim of Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought, an exhibition that seeks to draw a map formed by cartographies created by twentieth- and twenty-first century artists, is to invite the visitor to question both the systems of representation that we use and the ideas that underpin them.

The exhibition, organised and produced by ”la Caixa” Foundation, is comprises more than 140 works in a wide range of formats - from maps and drawings to video installations and digital art - on loan from the collections of several major contemporary art galleries. The artists represented include such essential figures as Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum and Richard Long, shoulder-to-shoulder with a roster of contemporary artists, including Art & Language, Artur Barrio, Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Erick Beltrán, On Kawara, Alighiero Boetti, Thomas Hirschhorn and Francis Alÿs, amongst others. Finally, the exhibition is completed by a series of revealing documents drawn up by experts from other fields, such as Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Lewis Carroll and Carl Gustav Jung.

Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought. Organised and produced by: ”la Caixa” Foundation. Dates: 25 July - 28 October 2012. Place: CaixaForum Barcelona (Av. de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 6-8). Curator: Helena Tatay.     More information in the PDF press release