The MACVAC Vicente Aguilera Cerni Museum of Contemporary Art in Vilafamés will present ‘Como animales’ at the MARTE art fair, bringing together works by Concha Benedito and Silvia Sempere in an exhibition focused on human behaviour during periods of uncertainty. The museum describes the project as an examination of how people can respond collectively and irrationally when confronted with unstable conditions, likening such reactions to “animals in an estampida irracional”—an irrational stampede.
The participation forms part of the museum’s programme for MARTE, an art fair with which MACVAC has previously collaborated. The supplied announcement does not specify the fair’s edition, dates, section or presentation location, and no event dates are available in the accompanying listing. It identifies the project as a museum presentation rather than an exhibition taking place at MACVAC’s own building in Vilafamés.
‘Como animales’ draws on distinct but complementary practices. Concha Sánchez Benedito trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia in 1955 and worked across ceramics and painting on canvas. She moved to Paris in 1961 and attended lithography classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1963. The museum characterises her painting as gestural and luminous, with human figures often dispersed or obscured so that only a limb or partial bodily outline remains visible.
That treatment of the figure supports the exhibition’s emphasis on collective behaviour and physical response. MACVAC describes Benedito’s work as graphic and energetic, while also stressing the deliberation behind its apparently rapid execution. Her paintings, as presented in the museum’s account, move between the immediacy of gesture and the controlled construction of a scene in which bodies appear concealed, fragmented or difficult to distinguish.
Silvia Sempere is a graduate of fine arts and holds a doctorate from the Universitat Politècnica de València, where she is a tenured professor. Since the late 1990s, her practice has centred on large-scale installation projects addressing ecological questions. These installations may incorporate complex technological systems, sculpture, photography and video to organise a spatial and perceptual experience. The museum also notes that this work has not displaced her engagement with painting, sculpture, photography and video as autonomous disciplines, or her earlier involvement in performance through the Asociación de Nuevos Comportamientos Artísticos, known as ANCA.
The presentation places Sempere’s concern with ecological and technological environments alongside Benedito’s fragmented, gestural representations of the human body. The resulting pairing is framed by the museum not as a survey of either artist’s career, but as a reflection on the ways uncertainty can shape perception, movement and social conduct. MACVAC, which marked its 50th anniversary in 2022, is also home to the Centre Internacional de Documentació Artística, established in 1995 and built largely around the personal archive of critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni.
The available material confirms MACVAC’s participation in MARTE and the artists included in ‘Como animales’, but does not provide a public opening date, closing date or fair venue details.
