February 2020
My Cartography. The Erling Kagge Collection is part of the contemporary art exhibition series organized by Fundación Banco Santander at the Art Gallery located in the Grupo Santander City. On this occasion, My Cartography brings us closer to the vision of contemporary art of the Norwegian collector Erling Kagge. Erling Kagge is a writer and editor, as well as an adventurer who became famous for three extraordinary expeditions to the North Pole, the South Pole, and Mount Everest. Over the past twenty years, Kagge has built a personal, coherent, and surprisingly fresh collection. The prestigious curator Bice Curiger has selected 188 pieces for the exhibition, highlighting renowned artists such as Ian Cheng, Eliza Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Raymond Pettibon, and Franz West. My Cartography: The Erling Kagge Collection opens up a vast horizon that invites visitors to immerse themselves in a rich universe of ideas and suggestive questions. Raymond Pettibon started his artistic career in the demimonde of punk rock—illustrating record covers for his brother, Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, and the influential SST label—and has never stopped being a punk. Influenced by cartoons, but also by William Blake, and appended with discontinuous fragments of text reflecting Pettibon’s voluminous reading—for a seeming renegade, he is simultaneously something of a bookish intellectual—his art serves as a large-scale indictment of American society, of its sublimated violence in sports, sexism, warlike tendencies, conservatism, and capitalist obsession. A drawing of a sour-faced, old-fashioned, pistol-toting moll, captioned “$5,000 for the mink ... a little more for the girl” wraps several of these concerns succinctly together. Another drawing, featuring a screaming bear cub, compares mother polar bears to—well, who, we might wonder—as we read that they wouldn’t send their cubs around the world to kill brown bears. Pettibon’s aesthetic, at once fixed and seemingly endlessly replenishable, may seem sociable and familiar, even halfway wistful, but there is genuine venom in his ink.