"MIRALLES. Photos & Collages". Tribute to MIRALLES

Description by Enric Miralles Foundation

The exhibition MIRALLES. Photos & Collages is part of the MIRALLES events, promoted by the Fundació Enric Miralles with the support of the Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat de Catalunya, with the aim of paying tribute to the figure of the Catalan architect Enric Miralles in his many facets as a creator, and of whose death marked 20 years in 2020.

The curators of the MIRALLES events are Benedetta Tagliabue and Joan Roig i Duran, and also collaborating are the Miralles Tagliabue EMBT architecture studio, the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura (ETSAB) and the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC).

The exhibition MIRALLES. Photos & Collages wants to show the legacy of Enric Miralles through his photographic gaze and the creation of his collages, an important personal and poetic tool in his creative process, both to explore projects and to document interesting moments of travel or life.

"The collage is a document that fixes a thought in a place in a vague, deformed and deformable way ... it fixes a reality in order to work with it”

Enric Miralles, 1995
 

MIRALLES. Photos & Collages is curated by Salvador Gilabert Sanz, professor, and project manager at Miralles Tagliabue EMBT. It is the first time that such a wide exhibition has been held focused on this facet of the architect. The exhibition includes about 170 collages.

The large quantity and diversity of material found in the archive of the Fundació Enric Miralles indicates that collage helped him to think and that he worked systematically, almost compulsively, in this format. Through this format, their way of learning, looking, and projecting is illustrated, placing value on detail and daily activity.

Miralles gives various uses to this technique. In the first instance, he uses it to document himself. For him it was essential to gather exhaustive information about the place where a project was going to be developed, about the history, the typography, and the nature, so he took many photos of the pre-existing elements. In fact, in some of his notebooks he already works with the information in this format. The collage becomes an introduction to the context, the starting point of the creative process, or as he put it, "a way of getting hooked on the place”.

In a second phase, the collage serves as a tool for the elaboration process. In this process Miralles mixes techniques with total freedom, collage with drawing, plans that can become collages, etc.

Moving forward in the creative process, this format will allow you to fragment. Miralles wanted to capture the reality of the place, but he did not want to use photography as something static because this generated a limited gaze. By fragmenting the image, he obtains different points of view on the object and enriches the spatial vision.

The fourth purpose he gives to collage is playful. With this technique he plays on his own projects, deconstructs, and rebuilds them, or uses this language to expose his work to others.

Miralles does not boast of creating from nothing, on the contrary, he publicly admires his references, among whom are architects and artists of all disciplines. Inspired by David Hockney (Enric defined his photomontages as “Hockney photos”) and also by Gordon Matta-Clark or by surrealist artists, these photo-collages want to experiment with the simultaneity of perception. As Miralles himself explains, these productions try to make one forget the tradition of perspective and his way of representing and thinking about the physical reality of things. They escape the only point of view and introduce a certain deconstruction, almost like simultaneous sketches with multiple visions of the same moment. They are essential to understand the work of Enric Miralles.

On the route of the exhibition, is possible to find photomontages from various periods, from 1989, where he began to use them, until 2000, with different techniques (montages, collages, cuts or "Cut outs").

The most common collage format is 100 * 70cm, which allows you to integrate between 40 and 50 photographs approximately, but there are versions in which you double and even quadruple this size, creating pieces of 200 * 140cm.

The exhibition is organized chronologically, but also grouping the themes of documenting places and works, creating projects, learning while traveling, looking at other architects and architectures, and gazing lovingly at moments of one's own personal life, moments often mixed with each other.

Models, notebooks, sketches, and drawings that are directly related to the theme of the assembly are added. Most of these materials are presented to the public for the first time and are unpublished.

The exhibition system was personally designed by Miralles for the ARCO fair in 1996 but could not be carried out in the end, and this will be the first time to be shown to the public.