Painting Is Easy. Do It Yourself!

An exhibition from the 'la Caixa' Foundation Contemporary Art Collection conceived by curator João Maria Gusmão, exploring what art means when everyone can create. About 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. In practice, what we see today is quite different. The promise that everyone can create has itself become a product, trading on each person's vanity: the desire to express ourselves and be seen, sold back to us under the guise of freedom. This paradox reflects a recent shift in how we understand the concepts of factory, product and consumer. The boundaries between the three have blurred. Social life itself has become a production line. In a culture that has normalised self-entrepreneurship and turned other people's attention into currency, the place of the art object—its value and purpose—has become uncertain. This exhibition brings together experimental and critical practices from the past 50 years that anticipated or responded to this change through the materials, processes and ideas they engage with. They offer a critical reflection on what art means in the collective imagination of our time. It includes works from the 'la Caixa' Foundation Contemporary Art Collection by artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Isa Genzken, Doris Salcedo, Franz West, Cristina Iglesias, Ana Jotta and Jorge Queiroz. Each work is accompanied by an 'artist's recipe', created by curator João Maria Gusmão, comprising instructions and a list of ingredients.