Encounter centred on Carl Andre

This encounter serves as an introduction to the exhibition in the Museo devoted to North American artist Carl Andre (Quincy, Massachusetts, 1935) and looks to provide perspective on an artistic career that spans the second half of the 20^th century and which has been historiographically defined by its generational affiliation with the time Minimalism embarked upon the redefinition of sculpture.

Carl Andre. Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010, a show organised by Dia Art Foundation in association with the Museo Reina Sofía, is the first retrospective on the artist to look over the fifty years of his output, yielding over two thousand sculptures and a similar number of poems, dozens of hard-to-classify objects and hundreds of postcards. The exhibition aims to lend a reconsideration of Andre’s work and its uniqueness to the traditional reading of his sculptural works, based on the call into crisis of notions of authorship, objects and the spectator. Hence, it moves deeper into two key elements that give a greater understanding of this complex figure: on one side, the generational dialogue held with both past avant-garde movements and the ideas of post-modernity he anticipated, and on the other, the effects of his poetry. In reflecting upon the materiality of sculpture and writing, upon the form of language and subject matter, the artist rehearses an evolution of history, decoding and putting forward another reading of the present and, ultimately, transferring art to the sphere of experience. It is the convergence of these two modes of creation, a place of materials and words, which explains the reciprocal relationship Andre holds with place.

After the conversation, the audience in attendance will have the chance to attend the opening of the exhibition, to take place in the Palacio de Velázquez at 8 p.m.

Participants:

João Fernandes, deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía. He was previously director of the Museo de Serralves in Porto, where he curated the exhibition Robert Morris: Films and Videos/Bodyspace Motionthings (2011), and numerous others, with Ryan Roa.

Yasmil Raymond, curator of the Dia Art Foundation in New York since 2009 and curator, alongside Philippe Vergne, of the exhibition Carl Andre. Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010. She has recently organised projects and exhibitions with artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn (2012–13), Jean-Luc Moulène (2012) and Yvonne Rainer (2011–­12).