Turn of a Century. Spanish Painting and Sculpture

The exhibition Turn of a Century. Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1881-1925 from the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía will consist of a total 36 works - 22 paintings and 14 sculptures - by some of the prominent names of Spanish art.

The material varies considerably in terms of style and reflects the currents prevailing in European painting - particularly French painting - at the time. The subject matter includes several Spanish national themes. The human being and the human body are in the foreground.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue containing colour reproductions of all the exhibited works and two extensive essays on painting (Belén Galán) and sculpture (Carmen Fernández Aparicio).

The exhibition, which includes work by twenty-nine artists, represents a period, which marked the beginning of the modernisation of painting and sculpture in Spain. The works are based on the various opposing aesthetic concepts characteristic of artistic creation in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The painters Hermen Anglada-Camarasa, Santiago Rusinol, Darío de Regoyos, Isidre Nonell, Francisco Iturrino, Juan de Echevarría, Ignacio Zuloaga, Eduardo Chicharro, Julio Romero de Torres, Nicanor Pinole, Valentín and Ramón Zubiaurre, Daniel Vázquez-Díaz, Joaquim Sunyer, Julio González and José Gutiérrez Solana bear witness to the artistic transformations which appeared within the context of modernism, symbolism, expressionism - the styles prevailing in Europe - and the noucentisme of the Catalan environment. Their oeuvre, represented at this exhibition by a truly important group of works, is marked by the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the majority of the artists concerned, onto which are grafted some of the typical features of Spanish identity. The exhibited paintings include key works by these masters whom some critics have labelled precursors of the modern style.

In sculpture, the turn of the century also meant a break with the academicism of the 19th century. The starting points of the work of the sculptors Mateo Inurria, Julio Antonio and Emilio de Madariaga, who came to Madrid in the 1920s, were symbolism and classicism. Josep Clara and Enric Casanovas worked within the ideological and creative framework of Catalan noucentisme. This movement, in its aesthetics, also left its mark on the works in the exhibition by sculptors connected with Paris such as Julio González, Pablo Gargallo and Manolo Hugué. In around the third decade of the 20th century a new realism appeared, formally influenced by art déco and neo-cubism. This current is illustrated by the works of artists such as Daniel González or Mateo Hernández, who worked in Paris and whose work bears an extremely personal stamp, and in a more expressionist spirit by the works of Victorio Macho and Emiliano Barral who, like Ángel Ferrant, worked in Spain.

Pressetext

Turn of a Century
Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1881-1925
Koordination: Barbara Jaki, Oscar Muñoz
Kooperation: Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; National Gallery, Ljubljana

mit Hermen Anglada-Camarasa, Josep Clara, Enric Casanovas, Pablo Gargallo, Daniel Gonzalez, Julio González, Manolo Hugue, Isidre Nonell, Francisco Iturrino, Juan de Echevarria, Ignacio Zuloaga, Eduardo Chicharro, Julio Romero de Torres, Nicanor Pinole, Valentin & Ramon Zubiaurre, Daniel Vazquez-Diaz, Joaquin Sunyer, Jose Gutierrez Solana, Mateo Inurria, Julio Antonio, Emilio de Madariaga, Mateo Hernandez, Santiago Rusinol, Dario de Regoyos