Out of Focus: Another View of Art at CaixaForum takes blur, haze and visual imprecision and treats them not as accidents, but as one of modern art’s most revealing tools. The exhibition starts with Monet’s Water Lilies – a key moment in introducing blur as an expressive device – and uses that idea to rethink how later artists have represented perception and the instability of what we see.
It traces the aesthetic roots of blur from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into modern and contemporary art, bringing together painting, video, photography and installation by figures including J. M. W. Turner, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, Soledad Sevilla, Christian Boltanski, Bill Viola and Mame-Diarra Niang. At its core is the politics and poetics of unclear seeing: how blur can unsettle certainty, multiply points of view and open up new ways of understanding images.