Agustín Parejo School
30 Jan - 22 May 2016
AGUSTÍN PAREJO SCHOOL
30 January – 22 May 2016
Curator: Jesús Alcaide
Exhibition Session: Archive Sickness
Framed within a larger process of investigation into the artistic expressions that blossomed in Andalusia during the 1980s and 90s, this exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the work of the Agustín Parejo School, an active, radical, anonymous, collective experience that surfaced in the early 1980s and came to a natural, unpremeditated conclusion in the mid-1990s.
Coming together in a natural, organic way, bound by ties of complicity and affection, the Agustín Parejo School was not a conventional group or collective with a clearly identifiable date of birth and death, like others that appeared in Spain during the same period (e.g. Preiswert, Strujenbank, etc.). Rather, it was a series of individuals who, at different times, decided to share a life experience, an ephemeral experiment that lasted nearly fifteen years and whose activities had a direct impact on the social context of their base of operations, the city of Málaga.
Playing with language, temporarily occupying the public space, distributing self-published magazines, recording songs for independent labels, designing semiotized clothing, inserting pieces in television programmes and, of course, organizing exhibitions of paintings, installations and performances, the work of the Agustín Parejo School continued a rich tradition of collaborative practices inherited from the early 20th-century avant-garde and postwar neo-avant-garde movements. It was also ahead of its time, prefiguring a series of strategies and political praxes that came to the fore twenty years later, in which the issues of anonymity/authorship, poetics/politics and image/text were used as tools for acting and impacting on a specific socio-cultural context. The creations of the Agustín Parejo School assembled here constitute an unintentional history which, over the years, has come to be regarded as a prime example of that other way of making art, an alternative path to the dominant trends of the 80s and 90s.
30 January – 22 May 2016
Curator: Jesús Alcaide
Exhibition Session: Archive Sickness
Framed within a larger process of investigation into the artistic expressions that blossomed in Andalusia during the 1980s and 90s, this exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the work of the Agustín Parejo School, an active, radical, anonymous, collective experience that surfaced in the early 1980s and came to a natural, unpremeditated conclusion in the mid-1990s.
Coming together in a natural, organic way, bound by ties of complicity and affection, the Agustín Parejo School was not a conventional group or collective with a clearly identifiable date of birth and death, like others that appeared in Spain during the same period (e.g. Preiswert, Strujenbank, etc.). Rather, it was a series of individuals who, at different times, decided to share a life experience, an ephemeral experiment that lasted nearly fifteen years and whose activities had a direct impact on the social context of their base of operations, the city of Málaga.
Playing with language, temporarily occupying the public space, distributing self-published magazines, recording songs for independent labels, designing semiotized clothing, inserting pieces in television programmes and, of course, organizing exhibitions of paintings, installations and performances, the work of the Agustín Parejo School continued a rich tradition of collaborative practices inherited from the early 20th-century avant-garde and postwar neo-avant-garde movements. It was also ahead of its time, prefiguring a series of strategies and political praxes that came to the fore twenty years later, in which the issues of anonymity/authorship, poetics/politics and image/text were used as tools for acting and impacting on a specific socio-cultural context. The creations of the Agustín Parejo School assembled here constitute an unintentional history which, over the years, has come to be regarded as a prime example of that other way of making art, an alternative path to the dominant trends of the 80s and 90s.