Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel

The Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel (CIAC) is shown for the first time in Madrid at the Sala de Arte Santander, an exhibition space in the financial city of the same name located in the community of Boadilla del Monte in Madrid. For eight years, the Fundación Banco Santander geared its program of exhibitions towards the showcasing of great international contemporary art collections. On this occasion, under the curatorship of Patrick Charpenel and Magnolia de la Garza, the institution features more than 100 works in various formats by 58 artists, including: Leonor Antunes, Joseph Beuys, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Pierre Huyghe, Hélio Oiticica, and Diane Arbus. The Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel was conceived in Mexico based on a question that its curators must ask themselves to frame their projects: What does looking at contemporary art from a Mexican perspective imply? The title "Point of Departure" alludes, on the one hand, to the idea of miscegenation as an intrinsic characteristic of Mexico and, on the other, symbolically refers to a starting point for the formulation of ideas, poetics, and ways of looking at the world and being in it. According to the curators, "more than the encounter between two words, miscegenation meant the encounter between several worlds." In the manner of a statement, and taking full advantage of the architectural qualities of the exhibition space (with its movable walls), the museographic concept resumes Hélio Oiticica's "Metaschemes." Just as Oiticica destabilizes the pictorial plane, the walls at the Sala de Arte Santander have been rotated to form 45 degree angles, changing in this manner the distribution and view of the works, thus turning the familiar rectangular spaces into more open and more angular ones. The exhibition is divided in five thematic sections: Identity, Territory, Pedagogy, Community, and Economy. The dimensions of the exhibition space allow for the display of monumental works like the video installation by Gary Hill titled Learning Curve (1993), or the wool rug by Pierre Huyghe Plan for Untilled (2012).