Fiona Banner, *1966 in Merseyside, UK,
lives and works in London, UK
Key visual: Fiona Banner’s „Full Stops“ installed as part of the exhibition Scale : Sculpture (1945-2000), organized by the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, March-July 2023. Fundación Juan March Archive/Photo: © Dolores Iglesias
Installation view: Fiona Banner’s „Jane’s“ installed as part of the exhibition Scale : Sculpture (1945-2000), organized by the Fundación Juan March, Madrid, March-July 2023. Fundación Juan March Archive/Photo: © Fernando Ramajo
The exhibition brings together more than 70 artists who, from 1945 onwards, reflected on scale and used it as an essential tool in their work.
It includes names such as Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp, David Smith, Isamu Noguchi, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Karin Sander, Katharina Fritsch, Juan Muñoz, and Guillermo Lledó, to name just a few. The exhibition presents a reflection on the notion of scale in parallel with oth-er major developments in contemporary culture, such as its move away from the museum, the loss of the pedestal, sculpture’s connection with installation art, and its closeness to performance art and architecture.
Read moreThe show presents scale “as more than just a way of enlarging or reducing an original model. Scale has a wider range of meaning, and is itself more elastic than conventional discussion gives it credit,” as guest curator Penelope Curtis writes in one of the essays in the catalogue. The selection of the works in the exhibition and the production of the accom-panying catalogue were carried out by a curatorial team consisting of Penelope Curtis (guest curator and art historian specialising in sculpture), Manuel Fontán del Junco and Inés Vallejo (Director of Exhibitions and Museums and Head of Exhibition Projects at the Fundación Juan March, respectively).
Scale: Sculpture (1945-2000) is the latest addition to the sculpture exhibitions held in the distant and recent past of the Fundación Juan March. Most notably, it continues on from the 1981 show Medio siglo de escultura, 1900-1945 (Half a Century of Sculpture, 1900-1945), which explored sculptural works from the early avant-gardes up to the middle of the twentieth century. In attempting to trace the expansion and transformation of contemporary sculpture, Scale Sculpture (1945-2000) spills beyond the usual exhibition galleries at the Fundación Juan March. The works occupy the entrance area, the lobby, the staircase leading down to the auditoriums, the patio, and the adjacent garden made available for the occasion by Banca March, which is opening its doors to the public for the first time.
As Manuel Fontán del Junco and Inés Vallejo write in the introductory text to the exhibition, “The radical play on scale and the resulting transformation of sculpture have shaped the conception and the execution of this exhibition.”
