In 2018, the year the 25th anniversary of the opening of the CGAC building is celebrated, its collection—which started in 1995 as a result of the combination of new purchases and loans from the Xunta de Galicia—is regarded as the powerful backbone of a comprehensive artistic and cultural project for Galicia. The CGAC plays the role of a national contemporary art museum in Galicia. This means that it is the institution which is most capable of constructing the history (or stories) of art from a public perspective, which requires a commitment to investigative, experimental, study and critical analysis activities.
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The library is located on the first floor and treasures a collection specialising in contemporary art and culture.
Bleda y Rosa. A Geography of Time is an exhibition of twenty-five years of photographic work by María Bleda (Castellón, 1969) and José María Rosa (Albacete, 1970) focusing on their series Campos de batalla (Battlefields). Started in 1994 and recently finished, their project is exhibited as a whole for the first time.
The work of Julião Sarmento (Lisbon, 1948) is shaped from the borderline.
The construction of the CGAC building was carried out in parallel and in dialogue with the transformation of the former gardens of the Convent of San Domingos de Bonaval into a park, thanks to the joint effort of Álvaro Siza Vieira and the Galician landscape architect, Isabel Aguirre. To celebrate this radical, decisive urban transformation of Santiago, Javier Riera (Avilés, Asturias, 1964) has devised a brief walk through the Bonaval Park at dusk—at the moment when the sun sets, and darkness lets shapes and geometric forms appear on the trees, creating a scenographic moment with their projections. Inside the museum, and to complete the vision of his work, the artist presents several screenings along with two books of his recent blueprints, linked to the development of the projected images. Simultaneously, in the Project Space, a compilation of light presentations in natural spaces depicting the passage of time from day to night will be shown.
The creative drive of Loreto Martínez Troncoso (Vigo, 1978) emerges from behind language and occurs in the action as a privileged position from where to explore the tight-knit relationships of the performance with its historicity, with its present.
Angela de la Cruz (Corunna, 1965) has been experimenting with the language of painting for over two decades. The artist has tried to redefine the terms and boundaries of the medium since she began, focusing on painting as an object and in terms of what it can represent.
The work of René Heyvaert (Ghent, 1929 - Scheldewindeke, 1984) is sober, simple and at the same time, extraordinarily complex, linked both to the historical avant-garde and to his own life circumst
Accompanying the A Nation's Gaze video creation series, which is hosted by the CGAI in A Coruña and the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, and in exhibition format, the museum will show a selection of pieces that belong to its collection, organised following chronological and thematic criteria, which complement the works included in the sessions.
Since the very beginnings of her research and artistic practice, Ângela Ferreira has always focused her work on the colonial legacy of Africa and, broadly speaking, on the relations between Europe and Africa.On the one hand, she focuses on the architectural vestiges of the twentieth century, so closely linked to modernism, and, on the other, on the possibilities art and cinema offer as instruments of critical emancipation to think and implement renewed utopias.
The project 20 Red Lights is a political essay that unveils the implications of the economy’s digital financialisation and how it relates to the radicalisation of the neoliberal agenda—an issue of utmost importance in the context of our global culture, which deserves to be closely examined from the perspective of art.
The Collective Exhibition of a Collective is the result of the On the Railings project, an educational and creative programme whose goal is to encourage meetings, dialogue and outreach between the museum and the local residents of Santiago de Compostela. The local people thus become key players in the cultural processes of their own environment by creating contents that are already part of the CGAC programming.
On the year of its 25th anniversary, the Centro Galego de Arte Contemp