Out of Focus, another Vision of Art

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Image courtesy of CaixaForum

Monet's Water Lilies series introduced the concept of blurring into art, of the blurred and indistinct as expressive elements. This exhibition explores how this phenomenon provided a new way of understanding the world for subsequent artists, a key to reinterpreting a portion of modern and contemporary visual art.

Long considered a paragon of abstract painting, this series has also been a precursor to large-scale immersive installations. However, the blurred and out-of-focus effect that characterizes the vast expanses of water on the canvases had never been analyzed and is now viewed as a genuine aesthetic choice.

Drawing on the aesthetic roots of blur in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and tracing the intellectual, scientific, social and artistic upheavals alongside which Impressionism developed, the exhibition is organized into sections that combine paintings, videos, photographs and installations by artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Eva Nielsen, Claude Monet, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, Soledad Sevilla, Christian Boltanski, Mame-Diarra Niang and Bill Viola.

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