The utopia of transforming the world by improving living space was one of the aspirations of the Modern Movement and the artists belonging to the geometric movement understood that they had to add their experiments around the organisation of space to this constructive ideal. With the permanent reference of the Bauhaus and the influence of Jorge Oteiza, Gio Ponti or Alberto Sartoris, a good number of Spanish creators understood that the way forward was industrialisation and the dissolution of artistic categories in an art integrated into architecture as an articulating axis. Artists, architects and designers such as Miguel Fisac, Jesús de la Sota, Javier Carvajal, Equipo 57, José María de Labra, José Luis Sánchez or Néstor Basterretxea joined in this deliberate confusion of artistic categories.

Before his long trip to America, Jorge Oteiza had first-hand knowledge of the concerns of the incipient modernism practised in San Sebastian in the 1930s and kept among his ideals the model and doctrine of the Bauhaus that advocated the elimination of the boundaries of artistic disciplines and placed design in a pre-eminent place. Beyond some furniture made for his patron Juan Huarte, the sculptor preferred to follow the metaphysical path of spatial organisation through his empty boxes, which he called “spiritual furniture”. But he also exerted a powerful influence on some artists to assume that the practice of design was part of this idea of ​​modernity. During his period of work with the architect Rafael de la Hoz at the Chamber of Commerce of Córdoba, he put several of the artists who would first form the Espacio Group and then the Equipo 57 on this path. This exhibition shows some paintings, sculptures and pieces of furniture by several of the artists who were marked by this impulse. Thus, it will be possible to see works - both collective and individual - by Néstor Basterretxea as well as some members of Equipo 57 such as Ángel Duarte or Agustín Ibarrola.

Similar prerogatives were followed by other geometric artists -also called normative- such as some members of the Parpalló group. This group had its own designer, Martínez Peris, but it was Andreu Alfaro who created the chair that can be seen in the exhibition. The Galician painter José María de Labra was also occasionally affiliated with Parpalló, one of the most active defenders of the integration of the arts since his collaboration with Miguel Fisac ​​as a creator of stained glass windows or through his participation in paradigmatic projects of this way of understanding art and architecture such as the Spanish Pavilion at the Milan Triennale in 1957, the creation in the same year of the Spanish Society of Industrial Design (SEDI) or the Spanish Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1964, for which he designed a series of brilliant geometric lattices. Javier Carvajal, the creator of this award-winning building - also of the Triennale pavilion - was perhaps the architect who best knew how to integrate mural sculpture - see his work with José Luis Sánchez - and the one who devoted the most attention to furniture design, his best-known piece being the Granada armchair created for the same pavilion in New York. This joint exhibition by the José de la Mano and Studiolire galleries shows some of the results of this effort, in which industrial design became one of the essential elements in achieving the long-awaited integration of the arts between the 1950s and 1970s.