Frames and Documents, Conceptualist Practices

Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ November 30, 2011 - March 4, 2012

Curated by Jesús Fuenmayor and Philippe Pirotte.

Frames and Documents: Conceptualist Practices. Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection included over 60 pieces by 41 artists from different generations and latitudes, who share a common experience of promoting and transforming conceptualist practices, which have resulted in becoming an ever-present and driving force in contemporary art today.

The exhibition overlaps geographically and chronologically several times, highlighting coincidences regarding the artist's journey as historian both through an institutional critique (Frames) and through their capacity to question the ways in which we relate to memory (Documents). Because it is a selection of notable works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection—more than expressing or reflecting the historical canons that frame the study of conceptualist practices—this exhibition encourages multiple views and interpretations from which may uncover new ties within contemporary artistic production.

The works included in the exhibition highlight three distinct instances within the trajectory of conceptual art between the 1960’s and the late 1980’s. One group of artists included in the exhibition are those associated with the birth of conceptualism: Vito Acconci, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Luis Camnitzer, Joseph Kosuth, David Lamelas and Ed Ruscha, for instance.

Another group consists of artists like Marina Ambramović, Lothar Baumgarten, Juan Downey, Eugenio Espinoza, Anna Maria Maiolino, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, John Smith and Francesca Woodman who, mainly working in the seventies, participated in the dissemination of conceptualist practices across geographical and cultural boundaries. The third group of artists seen in Frames and Documents are those that worked in the 1980s such as Ricardo Brey, Sophie Calle, Eugenio Dittborn, Louise Lawler, Claudio Perna, and Allan McCollum, among others.