Nancy Spero Retrospective at MACBA

Nancy Spero “The Bug, Helicopter, Victim”, 1966. Courtesy the artist and MACBA.

Appropriately enough, Nancy Spero’s Dissidances opens on Independence Day at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).  Long an active voice in contemporary political and feminist art, the exhibition includes early work from her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago to recent presentation at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

It is the first major retrospective of Spero’s (Season 4) career held both in Europe and the United States. The title of the exhibition, taken from the text by Hélène Cixous for the catalogue, suggests a “potential reading which subsumes two basic aspects of the artist’s work: its critical, non-conformist nature in terms of the politico-artistic situation she has lived through during her career and the importance of movement and of the body as vehicles for articulating her discourse. Organized chronologically, the exhibition presents her work as a unitary project in which past and present become blurred, as in the ancient fables and narratives that have been an inspiration to her.”

The traveling exhibition runs through September 24th at MACBA, then to Madrid and Seville.

Happy July 4th!