Peter Halley. Normopathies. Works from the Es Baluard Museu Collection (group show)

The exhibition presents a selection of works from the museum’s collection, dating from the European postwar to the first two decades of the 21st century, leads to an essay on the relationship between writing as a technique in the exercise of power and its normative will. In our contemporaneity, nonetheless, forms of power are as heterogeneous as the many proliferate forms of writing.

The Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma Collection features many works from the period of the European postwar. In a range of works from Wols to André Masson, from Jean Fautrier to Antoni Tàpies, painting seemed to be engaged in a new calligraphic project. It was, in the end, an attempt to favour the emergence of a writing that might be resistant to signification or some ultimate meaning.

This selection of works from the museum collection aspires to be a project able to forge a history with these forms of powerless writing—forms that have not been constituted as a hegemonic writing—while reconsidering them from a contemporary perspective. Now the apparatus used to activate these works from the Collection is constituted by the critical positions expressed by the creators of other works, also belonging to the Collection. 

The proposition is to let the Collection speak through its own objects, while not losing sight of the fact that what we seek to revive is the history of power founded on the idea of not having power. The kind of power that frequently pertains to art itself.

More information: Es Baluard