DESTINATIONS: Malaga Spain

DESTINATIONS: Málaga 

      If you are visiting anywhere near Málaga in Spain during the next few months there is an exhibition worth a visit at the Museo Picasso between June 23 and September 24 2014 entitled El Lissitzky, the Experience of Totality (La Experiencia de la Totalidad) - an exhibition that brings together work by one of the most influential and experimental artists of the Avant-garde.

El Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers: SSSR na Stroike (magazine) 1940
Fundación José María Castañé, Madrid

     The exhibition, a duplicate of Lissitzky’s Prounenraum, created in 1923 for the Greater Berlin Art Exhibition, has been set up in Museo Picasso Málaga. Over 130 paintings, photographs, illustrated books, magazines, films and architectural designs make up the exhibition, which is curated by Oliva María Rubio and co-produced by Museo Picasso Málaga, alongside MART Museo d’artemoderna e contemporánea di Trento e Rovereto, Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera, Barcelona and La Fábrica, Madrid.

The Constructor (Self-portrait)1924                                                                 The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

     El Lissitzky (Eliezer MarkovichLissitzky, Russia 1890-1941), was influential, experimental and controversial and worked in the period between two world wars. Lissitzky approached art as a response to the demands of his time - a time of crisis, profound change, and of faith in industry and revolution.

     Born into a middle-class Jewish family, this architect, painter, graphic designer, exhibition designer and photographer worked with the Soviets after the 1917 October Revolution, with European Avant-garde art in the 1920s, and as a propagandist for Stalin’s regime in the 1930s until his death in 1941.

Proun 4B by El Lissitzky (Oil on canvas)                                 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

     Lissitzky contributed to the development of Suprematism, alongside Kazimir Malevich, and with Constructivism after that. El Lissitzky invented his own form of artistic expression, which he named Proun, and his work made strong connections outside Russia, both with the De Stijl group in The Netherlands, and in the teachings of the Bauhausin Germany.

“L’URSS en Construction” (magazine) April-May, 1936          Collection Juan Manuel and Mónica Bonet, Photo: Julio César González

MUSEO PICASSO MÁLAGA, Palacio de Buenavista, C/ San Agustín, 8,  29015 Málaga
www.museopicassomalaga.org