The museum aspires to be the vanguard of technological art, with a visitable warehouse, workshops and a collection of more than 200 works.
The NEWART Centre, the new technological art centre promoted by NEWART Foundation (NAF) on the Constantí road, is entering the final stages before opening to the public. The space aims to become a world reference in its field and strengthen the position of Reus and the province of Tarragona on the cultural map.will be officially opened on Thursday, October 2 in an official event that will be attended by the promoters of the project, artists of the sector and authorities. NAF will open its doors to the public in the weeks around the inauguration. The president of NAF’s Board of Trustees,Andreu Rodríguez, is more than excited to start "a stage with a lot of enthusiasm". "We are about to open the NEWART Centre in Reus, fruit of the work of many years in the world of technological art.We want it to become a national and international reference pointartists, agents of the sector and citizens in general," he assured the Journal.
With an investment of about €2 million,The NEWART Centre will have three main spaces:a temporary exhibition room of almost 200 square meters, one of permanent that will exceed 300, and a unique room dedicated to a single piece, the McCall room. In this last space you can seeFace to face II(2013), by Anthony McCall (Saint Paul's Cray, 1946), a video installation with smoke that takes life thanks to interaction with the public and that was already shown in Reus during the Capital of Catalan Culture 2017.NAF’s collection is expected to exceed 200 works by the centre’s inauguration.
The true uniqueness of the project, however, is in the training-workshop room and in a visitable warehouse of 1,500 square meters. The workshop has been conceived to offer artists the material and technical conditions that they often do not find in their usual environment to produce new works. Regarding the warehouse, it will become a key element, since technological art requires constant maintenance and can suffer technical problems easily. Those responsible for the foundation remember that between 70 and 90% of these types of productions are lost due to lack of space or the inability to properly preserve them. Therefore, The center wants to make the preservation of this heritage one of its great objectives.
The warehouse will have a double function. On the one hand, it will allow to keep the works in operation to detect and solve technical errors immediately. On the other hand,will open its doors to the public through guided tours, with the aim of revealing what goes on behind the scenes of technological art, an aspect increasingly valued by visitors. The promoters say that currentlyThere is no space in the world with these characteristics.open to the entire artistic community. Avant-garde pieces
Surprising Pieces
The Centre will gatherworks of international artists and wants to offer a tour through the history of technological art, which emerged with computing some seven decades ago. The 3,000-square-metre main building is complemented by an outdoor area that Reus City Council is arranging to make available. This space will host outdoor exhibitions, a garden of native trees and parking, with the possibility of reserving space for future extensions. The aim is tocreate a major cultural hub on the outskirts of Reus, in a format reminiscent of major international museums:a place where you can attend workshops, conferences, guided tours or simply walk outside between works of art.
As for the collection, theNEWART FoundationIt includesPioneering and surprising pieces. One of the highlights isMà tèrmica d’artista(1973), by Luis Lugán (Madrid, 1929–2021), considered probably the first robotic artwork in Spain. Another highlight isFascinum(2001), by Christophe Bruno (Baiona, 1964), a proposal linked to the Internet that collects in real time the most searched images on Google, becoming a mirror of what is news at all times.
