Alex Trelinski
THE WORLD’S largest exhibition on the history of tattooing has opened at the CaixaForum Agora building within Valencia’s Arts and Sciences complex.
‘Tattoo. Art under the skin’ will remain there until August 27 after visiting Barcelona and Madrid in the last 18 months.
It has been put together by France’s Musee du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and goes back to the origins of tattooing and reflects on the resurgence of the phenomenon, which is now global.
Exhibition coordinator, Adrien Flament, said: “A tattoo is still the expression of the relationship that an individual maintains with his society.”
“It is an expression ‘of contemporary history that does not stop evolving,” Flament added.
This exhibition brings together more than 240 historical and contemporary works from different parts of the world including contributions from Japan and Polynesia to Thailand and Los Angeles.
It documents tattoo artists and tattooed people both past and present to explore the development of the art form into one of global artistic expression.
Displays include paintings, drawings, photographs, audio-visual displays and books, as well as objects such as tools, masks and stamps.
The Paris museum invited leading tattooists to reproduce their finest work on silicon replicas of body parts, with 20 examples in the exhibition.
CaixaForum Valencia head, Alvaro Borras, commented that the tattoo has every right to be included as ‘part of the history of art’.
