Ignasi Aballí: Infinite Sequence

The Fundació Joan Miró and Obra Social “la Caixa” present “Infinite Sequence”, an exhibition by Ignasi Aballí.

Curated by the artist and Martina Millà, head of Programs and Projects at Fundació Joan Miró, Infinite Sequence features a selection of nearly 40 works, whose succession in the museum spaces offers the opportunity to trace key aspects of Aballí’s oeuvre, with special emphasis on his most recent projects.

Aballí was judged the winner of the 2015 Joan Miró Prize, an accolade awarded every two years by the Fundació Joan Miró and Obra Social “la Caixa.” This prize, worth 70,000 EUR, came with an invitation to exhibit his work in 2016.

Infinite Sequence represents a change of direction with respect to previous interpretative approaches to the work of Ignasi Aballí, one of the leading exponents of conceptual art in Catalonia and the first Catalan artist to win the Joan Miró Prize. The exhibition invites visitors to gradually discover some of the essential aspects of the work of Aballí, with a selection of pieces from the 1990s to the present, spotlighting his most recent lines of inquiry. The presentation of the works avoids the retrospective format and is conceived as an exhibition narration with interrelated moments and spaces. A spatial composition which, according to Millà, “suggests the idea of infinite continuity and open repetition, a kind of looping self-reference, as announced by the title of the exhibition itself.”

The show contains nearly 40 pieces, of which 15 have been specially created for this project. They include paintings, drawings, photographs, objects, site-specific pieces, and a total of six video installations interspersed along the exhibition route which show Aballí’s growing interest in the moving image and cinematic techniques.

This exhibition, the first to be hung in the newly renovated spaces for temporary shows, marks the completion of a broader reorganization of the collection coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the Fundació Joan Miró. Ignasi Aballí has sought different ways in which to participate in the museum’s overhaul, exploring possible uses of these areas, placing some of his interventions outside the exhibition space proper, with pieces on the stairwell windows, in the library, even in the museum’s collection and documenting the transformation of the spaces with a photographic series titled “Interval.”

Infinite Sequence begins with Time as Inactivity, a multi-screen video installation in which Aballí ponders on the representation of time and its paradoxes. Another new video piece, Repainting Miró, is the first of a series of works focused on color, as well as on the relation between image and text. In A Thousand Words, for instance, the artist invited three different people to describe the same image using a thousand words.

The exhibition sequence moves on to a gallery devoted to invisibility and transparency, to the representation of what we cannot see, another recurring theme in the artist’s oeuvre, culminating in a piece on the glass stairwell where Aballí displays a transparent indexical list of concepts addressed in the exhibition.

The show continues in a projection room in the style of a multiplex cinema, where four films—Reflection (‘Passion’), Available, Film of an Image and This Is Not The End—evoke the impossibility of containing the semantic overflow of a given statement.

“My work is always constructed from the process of constantly rethinking what has come before, rather than from radical leaps or new beginnings. But I have a commitment to myself to put forward different ideas and perspectives upon each review.”

Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) defines his artistic practice as a constant loop around his investigations which acquires new nuances and produces different interpretations in each iteration.

The publication that accompanies the exhibition includes an analysis by art critic Guillaume Désanges, a conversation about language as display between European literature scholars Joana Masó and Arnau Pons, and a curatorial essay by Martina Millà.