Caixa Forum
https://caixaforum.org/es/valencia/exposiciones
Mundos de Alicia: Soñar el País de las Maravillas
There is never much doubt that the Caixa Forum generally delivers on some of the best curated works offered at a museum. The V-I team visited the Los Mundos de Alicia recently and it is one of the best exhibitions you may have seen or will see in a long time.
We all know the story. Alice. Wonderland. Simple, right?
However, the show is anything but simple. It offers a comprehensive history of over 150 years of the story that we all think of as being all too familiar but is really quite complex.
Lewis Carroll was, along with Alice, the invention of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics professor. He based his young, wise yet naive protagonist on his neighbor’s daughter, the young Alice Liddell.
\The origin story is certainly part of the exhibition with lovely photographs, prints, authors notes, letters and artifacts detailing the writing and publication of Alice in Wonderland. For a lot of museums these are the types of artifacts that are what one expects from such a presentation but the team at Caixa Forum delivers so much more.
After the first three rooms of the exhibit recounting the success of the Alice books the story continues across a century of artists interpreting and reinterpreting Lewis Carroll’s works.
The picture the curators paint is the groundwork that the author laid for the future of media and branding that draws a direct line to the world of Walt Disney, Marvel, Harry Potter and other artists during the 20th and 21st century.
Essentially Lewis Carroll invented modern media marketing, branding and licensing long before Walt Disney. In fact the exhibit both helps museum goers understand that at the time the ubiquity of derivative products on offer was a unique and innovative concept decades before Mickey Mouse.
This concept serves as a bridge to the last 90 years of Alice reimaginings from films to animation to toys and games to plays, musicals, books and even food.
There are so many artists represented including Dali, Heston Blumenthal, Ralph Steadman and Jefferson Airplane.
Visually stunning this exhibit is a curatorial masterpiece. Don’t miss it.
