Special Supplement: Artworks propose symbolic perception of reality

"la Caixa" Welfare Projects launched the "la Caixa" Foundation Collection of Contemporary Art in 1985 and to date has assembled a wealth of key national and international artworks of the past three decades.

The richness of the collection has made it a reference point in the Spanish art scene as well as a testimony to the variety and complexity of current artistic production.

The collection, comprised of more than 700 works by both recognized artists as well as young talents creating new directions for the art of the future, not only represents a chronicle of world art in recent decades, but also offers a broad vision of contemporary trends seen through the eyes of key artists.

The "la Caixa" Foundation Collection, consolidated as an open project sensitive to different artistic proposals, is also defined by its interaction with the public through anthological exhibitions, thematic selections and diverse activities.

Furthermore, "la Caixa" Welfare Projects gives out artworks from the Collection on loan and thus participates in numerous international exhibitions organized by the most prestigious museums in the world.

Visions and Expressions, a section of the exhibition, shows the varied ways in which artists express their experience of reality and their vision of the world through a range of mediums, from painting and photography to video and installation.

The expressionist painting of the 1980s confronts the more current visions of a fragmented, mediatized and fragile world faced with an identity crisis and rapid change in cultural values.

Aesthetic creation originates from infinite slight and irrelevant details.

Expressions that arise out of privacy, out of intimate emotions or the experience of modern life are revealed with a minute gesture, with abstractions or figurations based on images, symbols and techniques or with representations of the real or an imagined world.

This exhibition has been designed as a sensitive space that proposes a poetic, symbolic perception of reality, but also as a critical reflection of our relationship with the world.

(China Daily 06/29/2007 page19)