Artworks and literary works from all over Europe and America have been gathered together at the Museo Picasso Málaga (Spain) for The Grotesque Factor, an exhibition that has been devised as a journey through the complex areas of what is known, in terms of art and aesthetic taste, as the grotesque. The exhibition confronts the semantic and cultural ambiguity of the object examined in it and accepts its heterogeneous nature, in which disdain and piety, laughter and grief, empathy and derision, tenderness and fright, abruptly come together. Ultimately, it both rejects and embraces what we are.
The exhibition follows three different paths of genesis and maturity. Three cultural “versions” of the grotesque: one that is defined in certain forms of ornamentation; one that leans out over the abyss, to show us that there is nothing there to hold us up; and one that uses laughter to fight the foolishness of all things human.
The Grotesque Factor shows over 270 paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, books, documents and fragments of film have been gathered together for this exhibition. Works by 74 outstanding artists, who include Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Otto Dix, James Ensor, Max Ernst, José Gutiérrez Solana, Victor Hugo, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, René Magritte, Man Ray, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Juan Muñoz, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Juan Sánchez Cotán, Antonio Saura, Thomas Schütte, Cindy Sherman, Leonardo da Vinci, Bill Viola and Franz West.
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Date: through February 10.
Location: Museo Picasso Málaga. Palacio de Buenavista. c/ San Agustín, 8. 29015 Málaga, Spain.
Opening hours: from Tuesday to Thursday, 10am to 8pm. Fridays and Saturdays from 10am to 9pm. Sundays from 10am to 8pm.