Nancy Holt, trip to Barcelona

Until next January 7. The last day of the Christmas school holidays will be the deadline to penetrate the world of American artist Nancy Holt, a great reference of the so-called land art, a movement that emerged in the 60s that took art out of galleries and museums to dialogue directly with natural space. This is one of Macba's big bets for this season, which hosts the largest exhibition of Holt ever seen in Europe.

The exhibition does not leave indifferent, despite being basically supported by photographs due to the impossibility of moving the artist's most significant works. It allows discovering Nancy Holt's world through her perception of space and time through her personal capture of the sun with the use of holes.

The artist's name may not be widely known, but when one comes across images of what is perhaps her most famous work, the Sun Tunnels, the viewer recognizes it and is captivated by Holt's skill in manipulating light in the middle of the Utah desert. This iconic work of land art consists of four large concrete cylinders arranged in a cross shape that react to the sun in different ways. Thus, each tunnel aligns with sunrise, sunset, and the summer and winter solstices.

For this reason, the place is a regular destination for visitors who want to witness this astronomical spectacle live. In addition, each tunnel has holes in the upper part that allow the sun's rays to be trapped. The holes form the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. Holt thus brings the sky to earth. It is an experience that requires living it live in Utah, but the photographs in the exhibition allow it to be recreated.

The exhibition Nancy Holt / Inside Out gathers a selection of the artist's works between 1966 and 1992. It has been carried out in collaboration with the Holt / Smithson Foundation and the Bidmuseet in Umea, Sweden. Holt, born in 1938 and deceased in 2014, began her artistic career with concrete poetry. 1968 marked her great turning point, after a trip to the American West that ended up being a kind of initiatory experience. "Space and sky and sun knocked me out," she wrote about that trip.

The impact of the immensity of the desert and her training as a biologist led her to experiment with the connections between science and art and to interrelate the built world with the natural one. And she found in land art the way to express herself. This movement coincided with the beginning of ecological awareness. Both converged and gave consistency to an art that, like the Sun Tunnels, cannot be bought or sold, thus changing the perception that had been held until then.

The Macba exhibition has turned Barcelona into the European capital of Nancy Holt's work, who defined herself as a "perception artist". The artist herself acknowledges that having grown up in New Jersey almost predestined her thanks to the landscape of industrial decay that surrounded her and what she called "highway culture".

Travel, starting in 1968, became a very important part of Holt's work. Thus, interstate highways and the photographic camera allowed her to create visual poems. One of them, present in the exhibition, is titled California Sun Signs, in which, during a 1972 trip through this West Coast state, she gathered photographs of billboards that include the word sun.

So, don't hesitate to visit the exhibition. And remember, until January 7th.