Long live the revolution of Fina Miralles, Susana Solano and Eva Lootz

BarcelonaWhen Joan Miró set out to create his foundation, he did not want it to be a mausoleum for his art, but rather a centre that would shelter younger artists. Thus, Espai 10, which was later renamed Espai 13, was a pioneering place for creators of the younger generations to be able to exhibit, sometimes for the first time, in an institution. Among these creators were Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950), Susana Solano (Barcelona, ​​​​1946) and Eva Lootz (Vienna, 1940), who exhibited at Espai 10 in the seventies and eighties.

Now the foundation is celebrating its revolutionary drive with an exhibition where you can see the reconstruction of the installations that were displayed in 1979, 1980 and 1986, respectively, and other works currently kept in museums such as the MACBA, the CA2M in Móstoles and the Museo de la Música. It also highlights that for decades the three have spared no effort to consolidate and continue their career. "The three projects stand out a lot, and they are artists who have persevered and have managed to carry on an artistic practice until a very respectable age, something quite unusual in our country, especially for women," says Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Joan Miró Foundation and the curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition is entitled Between two courtyards, a reference to the fact that Espai 10 was located between the two courtyards of the Sert building, the carob and olive courtyards, and will be open until May 18. In order to reconstruct the installations, the artists' sketches and existing photographs have been essential. For Millà, the three share an attitude towards "an inherited system." "The three were born after the end of the world, after the disaster of the Second World War, which left Europe in ruins, and Spain was devastated. Eva Lootz had to leave Austria and Fina Miralles and Susana Solano were children of the Spanish post-war period," explains Millà. In this context, Miralles was the first to exhibit in 1979 with a project entitled Landscape, with which she proposed an alternative to reconnect with the land and, artistically, deconstruct the genre of landscape.

"They are three foundational artists, because after the end of the world they wanted to rethink the rules of the game, and they succeeded, and they started from scratch," says Millà. "They treated their story very carefully so as not to enter into the game of imposed female models with which they did not identify and which they wanted to leave aside," says the curator. "Nature has been my great teacher, I have not had to do anything, I have made myself available, I have followed the dictates of the forms and words," says Miralles. "I chose the path of culture and of making myself, the art market and the other artists took another path," she explains.

Associate materials with ideas

A year after Fina Miralles, it was Susana Solano's turn, with the exhibition Sculptures and drawings. At the time, Solano was still studying fine arts, and had to endure the mockery of her teachers who described the raw canvases that overflowed the stretcher, like those she exhibited at the foundation, as "bread bags." Solano's mother was a seamstress, although she did not practice, and seeing her work with her hands was an incentive to start. "Afterwards you abandon this, because you have to associate the material with an idea," says Solano. "That exhibition was a great opportunity," she adds. "And there was someone who told me that, since I was exhibiting Miró, I should know what I was exhibiting because it would define my career. It was very important to be able to see my work as a spectator."

For Lootz, who presented the project in 1986 Sands, what the three exhibited works have in common is that "they don't pay attention to the discourse, but rather start from very elementary things, from what they have in front of their nose." In their case, they were a wooden cube open at the top, into which the sand that surrounds it enters, and another wooden cube that works the other way around. Because it has open edges, the sand inside falls out. "So I did it very intuitively, but in retrospect I see that there was a theme that has worried me a lot, that of duality and opposites," says Lootz.