Art transforms life

In your haste to get out in the open air this sum­mer, don’t for­get there is plenty going on in­doors. An ex­am­ple are the many ex­hi­bi­tions around the coun­try. If there is one thing Cat­alo­nia does well, it is art, and there is al­ways a be­wil­der­ing num­ber of ex­hi­bi­tions run­ning, so many in fact it is hard to pick just one out. How­ever, this month you could do worse than visit Fred­eric Amat’s new ex­hi­bi­tion, Zoòtrop, that runs until July 16 in Barcelona’s La Pe­dr­era.

Amat is one of the coun­try’s lead­ing con­tem­po­rary artists, a spe­cial­ist in so-called in­ter­ven­tions for nat­ural and urban pub­lic spaces. The Barcelona-born artist’s ex­hi­bi­tion in the Gaudí build­ing in­cludes a se­lec­tion of his in­ter­ven­tions, with the aim of “of­fer­ing a map or topo­graph­i­cal vi­sion of his work,” ac­cord­ing to La Pe­dr­era Foun­da­tion’s web­site (www.​lapedrera.​com).

Zoòtrop is split into three areas that be­tween them aim to re­cover the mem­ory of the Gaudí build­ing, to pro­vide in­sight into Amat’s per­sonal uni­verse, and fea­ture some of his urban and rural ar­chi­tec­tural pro­jects. The ex­hi­bi­tion’s title is a ref­er­ence to the pre-film an­i­ma­tion de­vice known as a zoetrope, since the ex­hibit aims to pro­vide an in­sight into the dif­fer­ent evolv­ing facets of Amat’s work.

The ex­hi­bi­tion en­tered its sec­ond and final phase with a joint per­for­mance on June 21. “Con­ferència es­queix­ada” saw the Baró d’Ével con­tem­po­rary cir­cus com­pany and Amat give a dy­namic per­for­mance that in­cluded im­ages, sound and paint­ing to co­in­cide with the sum­mer sol­stice. At one point, Amat even turned against one of his own cre­ations, his crisàlides sculp­tures, which the artist jus­ti­fied with Cata­lan artist Joan Brossa’s idea of art as a con­stant trans­for­ma­tion: “Art is trans­for­ma­tion and trans­for­ma­tion is life,” he said.