Exhibition 'Out of Focus: Another View of Art'

Monet’s Water lilies series introduced the concept of blur into art, using the indistinct and the imprecise as expressive elements. This exhibition explores how this phenomenon offered later artists a new way of understanding the world, becoming a key to reinterpreting part of modern and contemporary artistic production. Long considered a benchmark of abstract painting, the series is also seen as a precursor to large-scale immersive installations. However, the blurred, out-of-focus effect that characterises the vast expanses of water in the canvases had never been analysed before and is now understood as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Drawing on the aesthetic roots of blur in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and following the intellectual, scientific, social and artistic upheavals alongside which Impressionism developed, the exhibition is organised into sections that combine paintings, videos, photographs and installations by artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Eva Nielsens, Claude Monet, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, Soledad Sevilla, Christian Boltanski, Mame-Diarra Niang and Bill Viola, among others.