MUSAC . MUSEUM OF THE 21st CENTURY
The MUSAC , Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, located in the city of León, emerges as a museum of the present . The activities it will generate shall encompass current creation .
The museum aims to be a fundamental piece in the development of Contemporary Art in an international level . It emerges with a broad experimental outlook in the creation and development of exhibits and projects in all levels .
The MUSAC shall work almost exclusively in the temporal aspect of the present, marked naturally by recent memory . The museum surges forth with the idea of developing a new attitude in the approach towards 21st century art . The latter years of the past century assumed the beginning of the temporal parameter with which to part . In this way, the MUSAC appears as a clear exponent of a new period in history, where revolutionary aesthetic values and artistic behaviours in the past are already established .
As a Museum of the Present or Museum of the 21st Century, the MUSAC assumes the responsibility of projecting itself physically on terrain, which, like all other experiments, carries with it a great portion of risk .
The museum is constructed with the pretension of being a place for interrelations, where the public is not just a mere passive element that contemplates . Workshops talks, sessions with artists, didactic guides and works wherein the spectator interacts, are some of the essential elements in the dynamic of the MUSAC .
THE ARCHITECTURE
Atop an extended urban expanse the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León ( MUSAC ) defines the art venue in the same optimistic way Roman surveyors laid their towns out on the landscape . As opposed to other kinds of space whose museistic quality is centered on the showing of finite historical collections, the MUSAC is a living space that opens the door to a wide range of contemporary artistic expressions; an art center that constructs a series of game boards in which action is the leading player of the space itself; a structure that develops from an open system made up of a fabric of squares and rhomboids which permit a secret geography of memory to be constructed .
The MUSAC is a new space for culture, understanding this as something which renders the links between human beings and nature visible . A set of autonomous, interconnected exhibition rooms enables exhibitions of different types and sizes to be created; each irregularly shaped room constructs a continuous, yet spatially separate space which gives onto the other rooms and patios, providing longitudinal, transversal and diagonal vistas . Five hundred prefabricated beams close off a series of spaces characterized by systematic repetition and formal expressiveness .
Outside, the public space assumes a concave shape in order to accommodate different activities and encounters, a shape subsumed by huge colored panels of glass in which homage is paid to the city as a place of personal intercommunication . Inside, a great expanse of continuous, yet distinctive, spaces dotted with patios and large skylights gives rise to an expressive system that communicates the interests art and architecture share: the contemporary manifestation of the variable and the perennial, the different and the same, the universal and the transitory, as an echo of our own diversity and equality as individuals .
As a single-story entity built with walls of white concrete and huge colored panes of glass on the outside, the MUSAC aspires to be a space in which art feels at home and helps to erase the frontier between private and public, leisure and work, and finally art and life .
THE COLLECTION
Works of over 150 international artists comprise the collection of MUSAC , some of whom are as follows:
Matthew Barney
Shirin Neshat
Thomas Hirschhorn
Alfredo Jaar Andreas
Gursky Pierre Huyghe
Pipilotti Rist
Olaf Breuning
Diller + Scofidio
Alicia Framis
Ana Laura Aláez
Christian Jankowski
Muntean / Rosenblum
Allan Sekula
Marcel Dzama
Daniele Buetti
Yinka Shonibare
Olafur Eliasson
Rikrit Tiravanija
Paul Graham
Gregory Crewdson
Filipa Cesar
Joao Onofre
ACQUISITION COMMITTEE
Rafael Doctor Roncero, Director, MUSAC
Agustín Pérez Rubio, Chief Curator, MUSAC
Octavio Zaya, Independent Curator, Documenta XI
José Guirao, Director, Casa Encendida, Madrid
Estrella de Diego, Independent Critic and Profesor of Art History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Javier Hernando, Independent Critic and Profesor of Art History, Universidad de León
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