Max Andrews' Valencia Feature in frieze magazine, November-December 2019
Sat, Nov 2 2019
Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), 1989. Courtesy: Institut Valencià d’Art Modern. Photograph: Juan García Rosell.
Max Andrews, co-director of Latitudes and contributing editor to frieze magazine, has written the feature-length article ‘The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Spain’s First Modern Art Museum’ for the November–December 2019 (issue 207) of frieze.
The article focuses on the rise, fall, and reinvention of the city’s trailblazing Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) through the cultural and (often notorious) political agents that have forged its institutional history since it opened in 1989. It also touches on the roles of other important institutions in the contemporary art landscape in Valencia, such as the Centre del Carme, the galleries Luis Adelantado, espaivisor, and Rosa Santos, and the private art foundation Bombas Gens Centre d'Art, that opened in 2017 in a former 1930s hydraulic pump factory.
Fermín
Jiménez Landa, ‘Salvar el foc’ (Save the Fire), 2018, public sculpture and performance documentation. Courtesy: the artist.
"On the night of 19 March 2017, artist Fermín Jiménez Landa lit a match from the embers of a smouldering monument in a square within the Spanish city of Valencia. From that flame, he lit a candle, then a lantern, then a gas heater, keeping the fire alive through various technologies for 365 days and nights, until it sparked the incineration of his own monument, a wooden representation of an apartment block. Jiménez Landa’s action was done as part of Valencia’s fabled fallas festivities, which culminate each Saint Joseph’s night with a vast spectacle of burning all over the city, as hundreds of elaborate sculptures, conventionally groups of clownish figures, go up in smoke. The fallas have long brought a satirical zest, and an irresistibly primal symbolism, to Spain’s third-largest city. They’re a searing reminder of the transience of art."
→ Continue reading here.
View of the collection gallery ‘Matter, space and time. Julio González and the avant-gardes’, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM). Photo: Latitudes, May 2019.
(Above and below) Views of the collection show ‘TIMES OF UPHEAVAL. Stories and microstories in the IVAM collection’, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM). Photo: Latitudes, May 2019.
View of the exhibition ‘The Gaze of Things. Japanese Photography in the context of Provoke’ at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia. Photo: Latitudes, May 2019.
→ RELATED CONTENT:
- Latitudes' writing archive.
- 11 de julio 2019, 19h: Mariana Cánepa Luna en conversación con Lara Almarcegui en el Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM).
- ‘Thinking like a drainage basin’ essay by Latitudes in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Lara Almarcegui. Béton’, 8 April 2019.
- Review – ‘Domènec. Y la tierra será el paraíso', adn galería, Barcelona, frieze.com, 13 March 2019.
- Opinion – ‘Frank Zappa’s Genre-Defying ‘Civilization Phaze III’’, frieze, January-February 2019, Issue 200, and frieze.com, 14 January 2019.
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- Max Andrews reviews in frieze: ‘A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018’ (LUMA Foundation, Arlès) and Pere Llobera's ‘Acció’ (Bombon Projects, Barcelona) and ‘Kill Your Darlings’ (Sis Galería, Sabadell) 4 January 2019
- art-agenda review of Frieze week 2018 15 October 2018.
- Report from Vienna Art Week and Amsterdam Art Weekend 28 November 2018.
- Report: Liverpool Biennial 2018 "Beautiful world, where are you?" in photos 17 October 2018.
- Report from London and Oxford, 31 May 2018.
- Report from Berlin Gallery Weekend and Cologne, 9 May 2018.
