What Humanity, the Human Figure in the Post-war Period (1940-1960)

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Image courtesy of Museu Nacional D'Art de Catalunya.

This ambitious exhibition will gather together around one hundred works by top-level Catalan, Spanish and international artists who, between 1940 and the mid-nineteen sixties, tackled the question of the figure and of the human condition, faced with the uncertainties, mutations, failures and hopes caused by the Second World War and its prologue, the Spanish Civil War.

As a continuation of the work carried out by the Museum on the art of the Civil War and in the context of the construction of the art collection of the second half of the 20th century, What Humanity will provide a cross-cutting look at post-war art, a period marked, among others, by existentialist philosophy but which goes beyond this intellectual framework to reflect a spirit of the time shared by different cultural imaginaries. After a global war, the holocaust and the atomic bomb, humanity entered a crisis and art expressed these concerns, projected especially on the human condition. Figuration often on the thresholds of abstraction, then takes on the challenge of representing the figure, of creating the image of wounded, distressed, destroyed or reinvented and germinal humanity.

The dilemmas raised by the exhibition are projected into the present, unfortunately, marked by extremely cruel war conflicts and a general feeling of crisis.

What humanity will relate very diverse works to generate parallels and contrasts between referential artists and minor or marginal figures but of great aesthetic and communicative value. In this sense, it will present aesthetic proposals that serve as a witness to an era and that have the potential to have a communicative impact on the current spectator.

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