The Serbian artist Marina Abramović (Belgrade, 78 years old) is lying naked and poses a skeleton. Abramović breathes and when the skeleton does it charges movement, as if two living bodies depended on a single breathing, that of the woman who has become one of the greatest exponents of conceptual art. This performance, entitled Nude with Skeleton (2002-2005), has been registered in video and is part of a huge exhibition that the Monterrey Contemporary Art Museum (Marco) presents about women who, like Abramović, have marked the history of modern and contemporary art. It is an exhibition of 160 works by 71 artists from 23 countries that are part of the collection of her Fontanals-Cisneros, one of the most important art collectors internationally. The exhibition, which begins this Friday, claims the place of the artists and their contribution in art, until recently dominated by male voices. “We come from understanding how art history is being rebuilt in this 21st century and understanding the role that women are playing in this critical recognition of speeches, because many artists are being recovered and every day are recognized more to those that were not central figures for multiple reasons,” explains Taiyana Pimentel, director of Marco.
Abramović’s piece – who set up a celebrated performance in February in the block of the architect Luis Barragán on the outskirts of Mexico City – represents, explain from the museum, the confrontation of the human being to mortality, the fear of pain and death. “It is the return to the problem center, not only the body, but to the methodology that is used for these representations, as is the case of tissues, for example. These fabrics are not free that are today in the center of the discourse. This has a lot to do with what we call female economy. Many of these techniques, let’s call them in inherited quotes of traditions, do have to do with women,” says Pimentel in interview Telefónica
The collection of her Fontanals-Cisneros (Cuba, 81 years) is a collection of 3,000 contemporary and Latin American art that manages the Fontanal Cisneros Arts Foundation (CIFFO), created by the collector in 2002. Fontanals-Cisneros, of Spanish parents and raised in Venezuela, has traveled to Monterrey to monitor the installation of this exhibition, which brings together a large part of this exhibition. His interest in art, which was born since childhood, says, because he wanted to be an artist, plans that changed when he arrived in Venezuela. “I was a gallery owner at an early age, when I was 21 years old and opened a gallery with a friend. Art was always in my life. My father was a composer and in my house there were always artists and little by little I went to that world almost without planning it,” he says in a telephone interview. The collector states that art has been learning for her, a path that has allowed her to know the human race and genius. “That intrinsic beauty in art, the search for perfection,” he adds.
Fontanals-Cisneros has been interested in the creation of women artists such as the Cuban Carmen Herrera (Cuba, 1915- United States, 2022), recognized as a pioneer in geometric abstraction in America and who already who Fontanals-Cisneros integrated early in his collection, because for many years his work was unknown, they explain from Marco. “He is an artist who died with more than 100 years, but whose recognition and repositioning in art speech dates back to just 20 years. He is an artist who comes to art history when he had already woven all the stories and ideas of his works,” explains the Pimentel. The collector explains, on the other hand, that in the last eight years she has been searching for crafts elaborated by artists, such as embroidery and ceramics, who have always been outside the main foci of art, but that she considers that they are alone are works of art. “In the last 15 years women have taken a position within the artistic world for themselves, not only for collectors, who have helped and opened the doors, but they have been brave women who have taken their position in art,” he says.
That is one of the great values of the Fontanals-Cisneros collection: shed light on these almost unknown artists. “A curatorial project had never been done to work the collection from the perspective of women’s artists,” says Sergio Fontanella, director of Operations and Collections of Cifo. “In another collection, perhaps it would not be so relevant, but in this case, where the collector has always had an intention to rescue or help to make women artists who have been part of different moments or speeches within the history of art that, because among other reasons to be a woman, they had not been recognized or visible enough,” he adds. Fontanella says that Fontanals-Cisneros has been a pioneer as a collector by putting her interest in creators. “It is something that is sedimented within his work, not only numerically, because notice that we are not talking about a mere representation here, but of a good representation. That is, a group of artists who are not here in this collection because they are only women, but because they are good artists who have had something interesting, something solid or something new that will contribute the speeches of the history of art,” he says.
The Marco exhibition, which will be open to the public until September 28 with free admission on Wednesdays and Sunday, is divided into three sections. It begins with the analysis of the avant -garde and the transition from modernity to contemporary. Here works by Gego (Germany, 1912-Venezuela, 1994), Lygia Clark (Brazil, 1920-1988), Lygia Pape (Brazil, 1927-2004), Cuban Carmen Herrera, Loló Soldevilla and the Italian artist based in Brazil, Ana María Maiolino, who deepened in practices related to feministic theories and opposed Military dictatorship The second section focuses on works by artists who explore social, political issues and the awareness of the environment, with the work of the Brazilian Regina Silveira or Marcela Astorga, who works in one of her pieces with the leather of the beef to denounce the ravages of the economic crisis that Argentina suffered. And finally is the collection that shows the production of artists who have approached the body as a form of expression, including Abramović’s production.
“The exhibition begins in the early 50s and you are realizing how the democratization of art in relation to women evolved. In the first section of this exhibition, which encompasses geometry, kimnetism, abstractions, you find many figures of women who do not have a central role in the construction of the history of art, because modernism was not very fair with them. The transition of modernism to what we denominated contemporary And, nevertheless, when the contemporary time arrives we can already speak that the equation changes, that the equation is invested, that 80% of the artists we are exhibiting were made visible at the time and that there would barely 20% of voices that are recovering, ”says Pimentel, the director that opens the frames of Marco to the women who marked the history of modern and contemporary art.