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TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

About

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About

The world we want to see

Our journey to regenerative practice

Awards and Recognitions

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TBA21–Academy

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TBA21–Academy

Confluence of European Water Bodies

Culturing the Deep Sea

Ocean Fellowship

Academy Exhibitions

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MNTB Exhibitions

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TBA21 Sites - physical and digital

MNTB Madrid

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MNTB Madrid

MNTB Exhibitions

MNTB Public Program

Ocean Space Venice

C3A Córdoba

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C3A Córdoba

C3A Exhibitions

C3A Public Program

Ocean-Archive.org

TBA21 on st_age

Highlights

Clear, Lucid, and Awake - Spanish Artists from the TBA21 Collection

Clear, Lucid, and Awake | Public Program

NICE2025: Becoming Ocean: a social conversation about the Ocean

NICE2025: Ocean Futurism / Oceánicos

NICE2025: POROUS — Ports as Interspecies Dwelling

NICE2025: TBA21 at the 3rd United Nations Ocean Conference, Nice

NICE2025: The Protection Principle Task Force

Open call! TBA21–Academy Artistic Residency in South America

Organismo | Art in Applied Critical Ecologies
Independent study program, Year One

Otras montañas las que andan sueltas bajo el agua
Exhibition at Ocean Space - Venice

Tarek Atoui. At-Tāriq
A Journey into the Rural Music Traditions of North Africa and the Arab World

Tarek Atoui. At-Tāriq | Public Program

TBA21–Academy’s public program during the Venice Biennale of Architecture vernissage week

Jón Laxdal
Pages from my Diary 4, 1992

Photo: Angelika Krinzinger / TBA21

Installation view: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Collection as Aleph, Kunsthaus Graz, 2008, Photo: Niki Lackner / Landesmuseum Joanneum

Jón Laxdal

Collection

Newsprint Collage
38.4 x 40.8 cm

Laxdal's chosen medium is paper. Harvesting his raw material from old newspapers and other printed matter, he has spent decades producing meticulously constructed collages. Light, ephemeral and fleeting, the paper is given a delicate permanence by his slow, considered process. Issues of typography, paper quality, and color all play essential parts in the choices he makes. The artist sets strict parameters for the frames, proportions and scale of each series of works, then systematically varies each individual construction within those tight limits. However, Laxdal doesn't solely make his collages based on aesthetic and formal decisions: content also plays its part. Each piece of paper is chosen for a specific reason after a long engagement with the original text and the ideas it communicated. As a result, each work becomes a kind of abstraction that nonetheless still has a vital, necessary relationship with the original reality operated within. Laxdal therefore creates new layers of meaning and beauty out of material that would otherwise be thrown away. The artist's work is characterized by a quiet, intelligent restraint that leaves nothing to chance.

*1933 in Ísafjörðu, Iceland I † 2005 in Kaiserstuhl, Switzerland

RELATED PROGRAM

Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad
Siege (Remedios, Colombia 2012), #1-11

Darren Almond
Midnight Mousetrap-Green, 2005

Armin Linke Prospecting Ocean

Walid Raad
Preface to the Second Edition_II, 2012

Walid Raad
Scratching on things I could disavow: Appendix XVIII_Plate 101: A History of an Index, 2009

Jón Laxdal
Pages from my Diary 5, 1992

Jón Laxdal
Pages from my Diary 6, 1996

Jón Laxdal
Pages from my Diary 7, 1996

Artists

Jón Laxdal