Up to 42 works will be initially exhibited at the Museum of Forbidden Art of Barcelona, which opens its doors this Thursday, promoted by the journalist Tatxo Benet. Francisco Franco in a refrigerator, King Juan Carlos I and the activist Domitila having sex with a German shepherd or Saddam Hussein tied in a kind of fish tank are some of the pieces that can already be seen.
The museum’s collection brings together a total of 200 censored works, with signatures such as Pablo Picasso, Ai Wei Wei, Andy Warhol, Abel Azcona, Gustav Klimt and Banksy. There are paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs, installations and audiovisual works that form a broad sample of cases that have often transcended the media and social networks, created largely during the second half of the 20th century and during the 21st century.
The person in charge and promoter, the journalist and businessman Tatxo Benet, highlights that to be part of the collection and the museum “a work must have a story behind it that has linked it to censorship, prohibition, and has been attacked.” “There are works of high artistic level and others that are not so high, but all of them have a very important story behind them, even in the history of art, because they represent those works that someone did not want to be seen,” argues the promoter.
‘Always Franco’ by Eugenio Merino in the museum. — Pere Francesch / ACN
The project is directed by Rosa Rodrigo with Carles Guerra as artistic director. The Museo del Arte Prohibido is located in the Garriga Nogués house in Barcelona, the work of the architect Enric Sagnier i Villavecchia.
42 of more than 200 works
Benet’s collection brings together works that have been censored, banned or denounced for political, social or religious reasons, and that the journalist and businessman has acquired in recent years. At the moment, they exhibit 42 because they do not want to overload the space: “We will let it work as it is and little by little we will decide how we change the works so that people have access to all of them.”
Of the works in the collection, you can now see the controversial Not dressed for conquering – HC04 Transporte by Ines Doujak, in which King Juan Carlos and the activist Domitilia appear having sex with a German shepherd. The work was part of the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign, which in 2015 led to the resignation of the MACBA director, Bartomeu Marí, who first canceled the exhibition and then backed down.
Other pieces that can be visited are Shark by David Cerny, with a satirical sculpture of Saddam Hussein inside a kind of fish tank, and Always Franco by Eugenio Merino, with the dictator inside a refrigerator. Among the 42 works you can also see Mao by Andy Warhol, Western and Christian Civilization by León Ferrari, Piss Christ by Andrés Serrano, Schwebender Akt mit ausgebreiteten Armen (Studie für Medizin) by Gustav Klimt, Mc Jesus by Jani Leinonen, Smiling Cooper by Banksy or Filippo Strozzi in LEGO by Ai Weiwei, as well as works by Pablo Picasso.
‘Political prisoners in contemporary Spain’
Benet began this collection with the work Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain by Santiago Sierra, and since then he has continued to expand the collection and consolidate it to make it accessible to visitors. The controversial work was removed from ARCO in 2018 and is currently on loan to the Museum of Lleida.
2023-10-25 08:55:14
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