Painting Is Easy. Do It Yourself!

If everyone is able to create, what is art today? Conceived by João Maria Gusmão and bringing together works from the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, this exhibition takes the question as its point of departure, exploring the alienation of labour, the economy of leisure and the place left for the art object. The exhibition opens with a photograph taken by Antoni Muntadas in 1989. It depicts the façade of a building supplies shop, painted with an image of a paint bucket and the slogan “Pintar es fácil. Hágalo usted mismo!“ [Painting is easy. Do it yourself!]. The idea that anyone can create has emancipatory potential, as Joseph Beuys observed: ‘Every human being is an artist.’ For Beuys, creativity was not a talent reserved for those who make art, but a shared capacity, exercised whenever someone intervenes in the society in which they live, a practice he called ‘social sculpture’: society as a collective form, continually shaped by all. Open item in modal