Rita McBride. Public Tender

Educated in the United States but based in Germany, Rita McBride is a professor at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work explores the production of public space and the reception of culture through sculptures that recreate familiar elements from our immediate environment. McBride sometimes dramatizes objects related to architecture and design, often through the use of unusual materials and unexpected dimensions. As such, she examines acquired notions of form, function, and material in relation to a vocabulary that challenges the myths of progress induced by modern ideology. In her pieces, industrialization, mass production processes, and the laws of efficiency are brought up against the role of handmade artifacts and the sphere of the dysfunctional.

McBride thus pushes the boundaries and the qualities of the white cube, a spatial modality that is often considered indispensable for the neutrality required to exhibit artworks. Once they have been inserted into these apparently passive environments, McBride's works question the allocation of functions that define and differentiate the museum, domestic space and the urban sphere. In this exhibition, the museum becomes a further element in the artist's sculptural process, through a specific intervention in which McBride strips MACBA of the additional elements that have altered Richard Meier's original design over time.

Exhibition organized by MACBA and curated by Bartomeu Marí

Rita McBride
Public Tender
Kurator: Bartomeu Mari