Activities, exhibitions and projects

Image: Fina Miralles, Imatges del zoo, 1974. Museu d’Art de Sabadell collection

The dislocation, the critique to the authority, the focus between what is natural or artificial, are questions that Fina Miralles (Sabadell, Spain, 1950) uses to confront visitors with the artist, the woman, the individual, as an object to be exposed and contemplated as a work of art. Miralles demystifies the work of art as a contemplative and untouchable, univocal object, while confronting us with our own condition as individuals in nature.

In 1974 she  presented the exhibition 'Imágenes del zoo (Images of the Zoo)' in Barcelona’s Sala Vinçon, an exhibition space within a shop specialising in designer products. The exhibition became a visit to a zoo, not the local zoo but a zoo created by the artist in a cultural space. It consisted of a series of caged animals that included Miralles herself.

Fina Miralles is one of the most significant Spanish artists. Her work arose in the context of the Franco dictatorship, a hostile, limiting and castrating environment in which censorship controlled all forms of expression for so-called moral reasons, determined by the power of the Catholic Church and supported by the regime. Miralles broke with the academicism taught in art schools at that time and with established behavioural norms. Her practice reconfigures the concept of the artistic, within the multiplicity of attitudes that blur what traditional historiography had encompassed under the heading of Conceptual art.