The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host on Tuesday, March 10, at 7:00 p.m., in the José Saramago room of La Plazuela (Arrecife), the conference entitled 'Between crafts and industrial design. Interior design in the fifties in Spain', which will be given by the art and design historian Patricia Molins. This activity is part of the centenary of the birth of César Manrique that the institution that bears his name will continue to celebrate until April 24, 2020.
During her conference, Molins will analyze how, throughout the fifties, Spain traveled the path that other countries had started in the twenties to reach the consumer society, in which housing and its needs become an essential economic engine, and artisanal production gives way to mass production. Throughout this process, says the historian, artists and architects worked together in an activity that was no longer artisanal and could not yet be considered industrial design: the decorative arts.
According to the speaker, "the integration of this work gave rise to some of the most interesting and beautiful experiences of the 20th century: from workers' housing, churches or colonization villages to national and international exhibitions (such as the Milan Triennials), and from the structural austerity of the first furniture models to the organicism that will dominate furniture and interiors in the sixties".
This conference is included in the cycle 'César Manrique and his contexts', intended to collect interventions that deal with issues related to the work of César Manrique and the historical context in which he developed his plastic, landscape and creative activity, in general. This forum, in which Juan Vicente Aliaga, Carme Pinós, Simón Marchán and Estrella de Diego have already participated, will end on April 16 with the intervention of José Luis de la Nuez Santana.
About Patricia Molins
Patricia Molins is an art and design historian. She has taught design history in various masters programs, as well as lectures at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (MUSAC) or the Museum of Navarra. She currently works at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS).
Interested in the relationship between art and architecture, she has curated several exhibitions on this theme such as 'Architecture and art of the 50s in Madrid' (with Gabriel Ruíz Cabrero, Fundación "La Caixa", Barcelona 1996), 'Constructive Switzerland' (MNCARS, Madrid 2003) or 'Rietveld. Utopia and pragmatism' (National Museum of Decorative Arts, Madrid 2008).
She has also dedicated several texts to this issue, among which are: 'Mystery and geometry. The decade of abstraction' (in Architecture and art of the 50s in Madrid, cat. exhibition Centro Cultural de la Fundación "La Caixa", Barcelona 1996); 'Modern interiors. The box and the lap' (in Rationalist architecture in Valencia, cat. Exhibition Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno [IVAM] 1998) and 'Operation H: from the Sao Paulo Biennial to the Pamplona Encounters' (in Encuentros de Pamplona. End of the party of experimental art, cat. exhibition MNCARS 2009).
