28 May-24 Oct 2004. The Joan Mir Foundation presents The beauty of failure / The failure of beauty, an exhibition composed by the curator Harald Szeemann and co-produced by Forum Barcelona 2004.

The exhibition concerns how the great dreams and utopias that seem so splendid in the abstract are doomed to failure when we try to materialise them, because they presuppose an entirely new, ideal society that can never exist. The artist protects himself by looking at the most everyday situations as a solution to such devastating failure.

The show is divided into twelve sections and brings together 150 works including drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations, by Mondrian, Kandinsky and Nauman. It covers great utopias, from 19th-century anarchism and its sequel in Barcelona during the Civil War, via the utopia of the total work of art, down to the social utopia of the late-1960s. In contrast, there is the art of the present generations, who mistrust utopias in general and opt for the individual experience, the concepts of love, education, sport, life and death.