Anys 30 ( Documentary Photography in the US. Perduts en la Ciutat ( Lost in the City, –) is a huge exhibition put together from IVAM’s extensive collection and which feels slightly (on purpose, I suspect) like a bit of a jumble, with cities and urban spaces as a common thread and touching on art forms as diverse as painting, printmaking (some beautiful Robert Rauschenberg prints), sculpture ( Miquel Navarro’s delicate constructivism, for example), photography (with great work across the decades by the likes of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gabriel Cualladó, Horacio Coppola, Humberto Rivas, Gabriele Basilico or Thomas Struth), film, video, landscape construction (check out Hannsjörg Voth’s stunning work!) and graphic novel.

IVAM acts primarily as a venue for temporary exhibitions, and the line-up for this Summer is quite impressive. In terms of modern and contemporary art, the obvious first stop for the art lover is Institut Valencià d’Art Modern ( IVAM, Valencian Institute for Modern Art), a European-class institution which (like many of its kind in Spain) suffered badly from funding cuts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and has not been free from the occasional public scrap about management and curating policy. In my previous piece I focused on ‘traditional’ art forms, particularly painting, so here I will talk about the ‘modern’ stuff I saw (whatever the distinction means!). As mentioned in my previous post, I spent last week in my home town of Valencia, running around in the Summer heat and trying to catch up with as many art museums and temporary exhibitions as possible (as I tend to do every time I visit).

El arte de volar by Antonio Altarriba