The utopia of transforming the world by improving the habitable 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 in the arrangement of space to that 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 path was industrialization and the dissolution of artistic categories in an art integrated into architecture as the 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 this deliberate confusion of artistic categories.

Before his long American trip, Jorge Oteiza had first-hand knowledge of the concerns of the incipient modernity practiced in San Sebastian in the thirties and kept among his ideals the Bauhaus model and doctrine that advocated the elimination of the boundaries of artistic disciplines and placed design in a preeminent place. Beyond some furniture made for his patron Juan Huarte, the sculptor preferred to follow the metaphysical path of the arrangement of space 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 that idea of modernity. During his time working with the architect Rafael de la Hoz at the Córdoba Chamber of Commerce, he set on this path several of the artists who would first form Grupo Espacio and then Equipo 57. This exhibition shows some paintings, sculptures and pieces of furniture by several of the artists who were influenced by this impulse. Thus, it will be possible to see works -both in their collective and individual work- by Néstor Basterretxea as well as by 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 designed the chair that can be seen in the exhibition. The Galician painter José María de Labra, one of the most active advocates of the integration of the arts from his collaboration with Miguel Fisac as a creator of stained glass or through his participation in paradigmatic projects of this way of understanding art and architecture as the Spanish Pavilion of the Triennale in Milan in 1957, was also occasionally attached to Parpalló, the creation in the same year of the Spanish Society of Industrial Design (SEDI) or the Spanish Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, 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 most attention to furniture design, his best-known piece being the Granada armchair created for the same New York pavilion. This joint exhibition of the José de la Mano and Studiolire galleries shows some of the results of that effort in which industrial design became between the 1950s and 1970s one of the essential elements to achieve the longed-for integration of the arts.