26 november 2026 to 17 May 2027
The Atomic Age will never end. Unleashed by the detonation of the first atomic test in the desert of New Mexico in July 1945, its impact on life on Earth extends across a time scale that it is very difficult to establish. The exhibition delves into this new experience of time and its links with science, politics, and culture through the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. From 1890 onwards, physics has demonstrated that the atom is not the ultimate element of matter, from which it is deduced that reality is not as solid as was previously believed. Artists react to these discoveries by combining science, mysticism, and occultism, or alternatively abandoning representation and opting for conceptual focuses that seek to make perceptible what is imperceptible. With the invention of the atomic bomb and its devastating use against Japan by the United States in 1945, western artists also offered a broad range of answers: the aesthetic fascination with physics, the new representation of the tragic and the subline, or the spectacularisation of nuclear explosions. The protest movements that emerged from the 1970s onwards have driven the criticism of civil and military nuclear development, which is transferred to new artistic practices inspired by ecology, feminism, anticolonialism, and counterculture. The contemporary Atomic Age, marked by the accidents in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, is faced with a progressive “nuclearization of the world” with challenges such as new policies of rearmament, the energy crisis, or the difficulties of managing radioactive waste. The exhibition also addresses Spanish nuclear history, from the construction of the first nuclear power stations during the Franco era to the current debates regarding the nuclear power phase-out. With close to 250 works — paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, and installations – together with often unpublished documents, the exhibition brings together a great diversity of responses to scientific progress and the controversies that it inspires, with works by artists such as Hélène de Beauvoir, Henri Becquerel, Bruce Conner, Eduardo Chillida, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Hilma af Klint, Jürgen Nefzger, Yoko Ono, Raymond Pettibon, Joan Rabascall and Nancy Spero.
A new adaptation based on the exhibition curated by Julia Garimorth and Maria Stavrinaki, and presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris / Paris Musées, between October 2024 and February 2025.
#EraAtomicaCCCB
