Exhibition "Imatges del cos". The Museum reinterpreted by Robert Wilson  

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                       Forum de les Cultures Barcelona 2004 / Museum of Pre-Columbian Art of Barcelona / Barbier-Mueller Collection

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Creation from matter to serve life and the understanding of death has always been one of humanity's concerns. This concern has been reflected in the production of numerous artifacts whose purpose, in all ancient cultures, served in most cases the sacred, a system of beliefs, cults and myths.

In this creation, the human being has used his own body as a model and reference language. This has led him to represent himself by stylizing its contours, isolating his face to turn it into an image, deforming certain body areas and, furthermore, projecting himself onto the objects that surround him in both everyday and cult settings.

In pre-Columbian art, the diversity of plastic solutions - volumetric or flat - of these human representations is very wide, both in forms and materials, and with a greater or lesser search for stylization, schematics or realism.

Robert Wilson exhibits these representations within scenographies created for the occasion, in which the object, far from its usual context, is immersed in a world of universal ideas. The figures seem to wake up from a long slumber to dialogue with the viewer, who becomes one more actor in the scene. The careful selection of the works in the Barbier-Mueller collection of Pre-Columbian Art in Barcelona allows us to go through more than seven thousand years of history to get closer to ourselves, our essence and our landscape.

The assembly of the exhibition is structured in a journey through three environments, in which Wilson creates a visual impact that immerses the viewer in a sensory experience of space. The visitor can draw his conclusions from this dialogue between the primitive object and the contemporary space that Robert Wilson offers us and reflect on the different modes of representation, as well as on the physical and conceptual scales of the embodiment of the body in art.

At the Museu Barbier-Mueller d'Art Precolombí in Barcelona, Robert Wilson surrounds us with his scenographies to create a game of relationships between two times, a look at the past that helps us understand the contemporary.