The Atomic Age

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Image courtesy of CCCB

The Atomic Age will never end. Unleashed by the detonation of the first atomic test in the desert of New Mexico in July 1945, its impact on life on Earth extends across a time scale that it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish. This exhibition delves into this new experience of time and its links with science, politics and culture through the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

With the invention of the atomic bomb and its devastating use against Japan by the United States in 1945, western artists also offered a broad range of answers: the aesthetic fascination with physics, the new representation of the tragic and the sublime or the spectacularisation of nuclear explosions. The protest movements that emerged from the 1970s onwards have driven the criticism of civil and military nuclear development, which is transferred to new artistic practices inspired by ecology, feminism, anticolonialism and counterculture.

The contemporary Atomic Age, marked by the accidents in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, is faced with a progressive “nuclearization of the world” with challenges such as new policies of rearmament, the energy crisis or the difficulties of managing radioactive waste.

With close to 250 works — paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and installations — together with often unpublished documents, the exhibition brings together a great diversity of responses to scientific progress and the controversies that it inspires, with works by artists such as Hélène de Beauvoir, Henri Becquerel, Bruce Conner, Eduardo Chillida, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Hilma af Klint, Jürgen Nefzger, Yoko Ono, Raymond Pettibon, Joan Rabascall and Nancy Spero. The exhibition also addresses Spanish nuclear history, from the construction of the first nuclear power stations during the Franco era to the current debates regarding the nuclear power phase-out.

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