Amalgama El Prado by Daniel Canogar

The Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain joins the Phillips Collection to celebrate its 100th anniversary with “Amalgama El Prado,” a project by Spanish artist Daniel Canogar that will be presented at the same time as “Amalgama Phillips.”

Originally screened on the facade of the Museo Nacional del Prado to mark the museum’s 200th anniversary in 2019, and now presented for the first time in the United States, Amalgama is a generative video artwork created with the Museum’s historically central painting collection. The Museum’s entire collection was transformed by an algorithm, created by the artist’s studio, liquifying the works of art into a mercurial blend. The pictures will be projected while they slide through the oculus in the ballroom of the Former Residence of the Ambassadors of Spain in Washington, DC. The title, Amalgama, or amalgam in English, refers to the process of blending or melting visuals.

Amalgama El Prado will be presented in Washington, D.C. at the same time as Amalgama Phillips, a new work by Daniel Canogar at the Phillips Collection conceived in celebration of the museum’s 100th Anniversary and recently acquired for the permanent collection.

Amalgama is an attempt to understand how digital media is transforming our experience of the history of art, perhaps updating Malraux’s Museé Imaginaire to the digital age. The swirling effects that have transformed the original artworks evoke the ceaseless flow of information that courses through the Internet, transforming how artworks are consumed, processed and circulated online. Amalgama above all addresses the challenge of making, viewing and circulating art in our liquid modernity.

About Daniel Canogar

Born to a Spanish father and an American mother, Daniel Canogar (b. 1964, Madrid, Spain; lives and works in Madrid) received a masters degree from New York University in 1990, but soon after shifted his interest toward projected image, installations, and public art. Canogar’s public artworks include Constellations, the largest photo-mosaic in Europe created for two pedestrian bridges in MRío Park (Madrid, 2010), and Asalto, a series of video-projections presented on various emblematic monuments, including the Arcos de Lapa (Rio de Janeiro, 2009), the Puerta de Alcalá (Madrid, 2009); the church of San Pietro in Montorio (Rome, 2009), and Storming Times Square in Times Square (New York, NY, 2014). He has exhibited at Reina Sofia Contemporary Art Museum, Madrid; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Borusan Contemporary Museum, Istanbul; American Museum of Natural History, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and Palacio Velázquez, Madrid, among others.