Sandretto

A Revelation. Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection

Patio Herreriano, Valladolid
11 jun – 1 nov 2022

“A Revelation. Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection” is a large-scale exhibition in which the Museo Patio Herreriano takes a look at some of the most relevant issues on the international scene through a selection of pieces from what is arguably one of the most relevant private collections in Europe. Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo was born in Italy and is based in Turin. She began collecting thirty years ago and did so with a radically contemporary vision, although her collection also includes historical pieces that help place those produced in recent decades in context. As we know, for some time now the Museo Patio Herreriano has been making a strong commitment to Spanish art. This exhibition, therefore, serves as a first step towards confronting the art produced in our country with the most avant-garde proposals on the international scene.

The idea behind “A Revelation” is that of art’s capacity to confront reality from an alternative position. This does not mean that the pieces exhibited here avoid reality – there are, in fact, positions of a strong political nature – but rather that they suggest new ways of understanding the complexities of our world, beyond the regulatory horizon. As we already know, the works of art of our time do not always express themselves logically, and are not defined by univocal readings. After all, they do not always wish to say something, and may very well often mean nothing at all. In the end, we are the ones who have to speak, to talk, through them and to shape our own interpretation of what surrounds us.

The celebration of Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s thirty years as a collector, which coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Patio Herreriano Museum, has been extended to Seville, where the Contemporary Art Centre of Andalusia has selected certain pieces from the Piedmont collection and installed them in the historic part of the museum on Cartuja Island. Both exhibitions, the one in Valladolid and the one in Seville, are taking place simultaneously, which gives a good idea of the scope of this collection.

“A revelation. Pieces from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection” is displayed in the Patio Herreriano in the four rooms on the first floor. We approach issues such as theatricality and staging – Room 3 – as the essential origin and motif of all works of art and the place where art “happens”. Here we find direct allusions to the concept of the stage as a pretext and metaphor for creation, and more or less veiled references to staging, such as those of Cindy Sherman and Philip Lorca-di Corcia. A look at the role of women in the visual arts and the strength with which they fortunately and definitively burst into the artistic context from the 1970s onwards can be seen in Room 4. With pieces that are vindicative and political to a greater or lesser degree, this space is conceived solely on the basis of work by women, many of them already historical, such as Babette Mangolte, Rosemary Trockel and Catherine Opie, and others more

contemporary, such as Sarah Lucas. Room 5 explores a crucial issue of our time and one that receives the most attention from visual artists: the relationship, if not the tension, between the analogue and the digital. This duality is seen with particular clarity in the way objects and living things are represented, motifs that have undergone a drastic transformation with the advent of digital technologies. Pieces with profound analogue roots, such as Andrea Zittel’s reflections on objects, are confronted by Magali Reus’ reflections on the material, while alongside the everyday representation of a cat by the classic Fischli/Weiss, we come across Katja Novitskova’s liquid, fast-paced circulation of animals. Finally, Room 8, one of the museum’s emblematic spaces, deals with the always attractive subject of ambivalence, the germinal substance of all great creation. With works of art by Mark Manders, Jeff Wall and Sharon Lockhart, this room shows that art always requires a second look, that we should never take anything for granted.

The exhibition “A Revelation. Pieces from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection” has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Abadía Retuerta LeDomaine, where a piece by the Danish artist Jeppe Hein, Flowing Water, from the Sandretto Collection, will be installed in the historical space of the Abbey during the exhibition.