This is mail art
MACBA displays its archive content related to artistic practices that have used the postal system.
Sampler # 2. This is Mail Art is the title of an exhibition, curated by Maite Muñoz, that can be seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) until 7 January 2018. The concept of mail art became popular in the 1960s among artists who began to use envelopes, postcards, stamps and also photocopies, engravings and collages as creative supports. In other words, they played with the language and aesthetics that are typical of the postal system, and also with its logics of communication.
The items in the exhibition have been selected from the MACBA archives, and, according to sources at the museum, "both formal and conceptual, [mail art artists] have many links to Dadaism, Fluxus and experimental poetry". They also come to the conclusion that this type of art has been practised more intensively in countries subject to repressive political regimes, especially in Latin America. Habitually these original creations were sent by artists to other artists, in exchanges that were free of commercial considerations and were distributed outside of institutional circuits and through international collaborative networks. On the other hand, the exhibition includes a series of journals distributed according to the philosophy of postal art, and which are part of various collections and collections.
Additional information on this exhibition is available at the following link.