Folleto exposiciones Miro-Paisaje-Retratos EN

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PORTRAITS: ESSENCE AND EXPRESSION

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PORTRAITS: ESSENCE AND EXPRESSION

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CONSULT EXHIBITIONS AT

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#JoanMiró #Elpaisajereconfigurado #LaColecciónCB #Retratosesencia Muelle de Albareda, s/n Jardines de Pereda 39004 Santander (Spain) Tel. (+34) 942 04 71 47

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centrobotin.org Cover: Joan Miró. Projet pour un monument, 1972. © Successió Miró 2018. Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Mujer de rojo (detail), C.1931. Lothar Baumgarten - Montaigne/Pemón, 1977-85 (detail). Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery.

Francisco Gutiérrez Cossío is one of the most important artists to have come from Spain. In Portrait of My Mother, painted in 1942, he captures the serene and kind spirit of the character in an image that, despite the strict construction in various planes, favours curved lines that soften the contours. Here Cossío also used glazes and sprinkled the surface of the canvas with white dots to create the characteristic atmosphere of his paintings.

In The Mask Maker José Gutiérrez Solana painted the portrait of his friend Emeterio in his workshop in Las Vistillas in Madrid.

The artist captures his friend’s personality in a symmetric composition, with well-balanced spaces. The work comes from his late production and, notwithstanding the overall blackness, it is a colourful painting endowed with an atmosphere all of its own.

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-between 8 and 30 people (guide included)-.

JOAN MIRÓ: SCULPTURES 1928-1982

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Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Mujer de rojo, C.1931.

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait with Injured Eye, 1972

Essence and expression are the two keynotes defining this collection of twentieth-century masterpieces, which its owner, Jaime Botín, has generously deposited at Centro Botín for its permanent display.

All these works share three common features that define and personalise the group: maximum expression through colour and light; the use of the figure as a common means of communication; and, finally, portraiture, the true essence of the selection.

These eight works of undisputed visual quality are by renowned, prestigious artists: Francis Bacon, Juan Gris, Francisco Gutiérrez Cossío, José Gutiérrez Solana, Henri Matisse, Isidre Nonell, Joaquín Sorolla and Daniel Vázquez Díaz. They were all produced in the early twentieth century at the height of the avant-gardes, a complex period that saw a break from tradition and the rise of a wealth of overlapping artistic and aesthetic movements.

Self Portrait with Injured Eye was painted

by Francis Bacon in 1972, a few months after the suicide of his model and lover, George Dyer. The painting expresses Bacon’s solitude, bereavement and his deep sorrow following his loss, while at once capturing his self-destructive personality through a disquieting, violent image with geometric forms that decompose his face and produce a highly dynamic effect.

EXHIBITIONS

Juan Gris painted Harlequin in 1918, at the height of his creative powers, synthesising the forms to a very few elements and reducing the motifs in a simple composition that develops and presents the human figure through overlapping planes. He also uses the character to emphasise colour which he always sets off with blue.

In Spanish Woman, Henri Matisse recalls his journey to Spain in 1911 to visit the Prado Museum and to see Andalucía, from where he returned to France with luggage full of brocades and mantillas and a powerful new light in his palette, that would be materialised in clean, open colours, which he does not mix with chiaroscuros, thus translating into a lighter and more subtle, more harmonious style.

Isidre Nonell painted this Half-body Figure in 1907, at a time when he abandoned his portraits of gypsy women, the main characters in his works until then, and started to paint more serene, collected and melancholic white-faced women. He also opt-

Joaquín Sorolla, Al baño. Valencia, 1908.

ed for colour as the sole element used to model the figure, superposing whites and blues to contrast with the black hair of his models.

To The Water by Joaquín Sorolla is a work of great sensibility and refinement which was painted in the summer of 1908 on the beach of Valencia. Especially worth underscoring is the delicate use of light and his restrained palette, rendered with thick brushstrokes and bright contrasts.

Daniel Vázquez Díaz is one of portraiture’s greatest exponents. Woman in Red was painted in 1931, after the artist settled in Madrid. Particularly notable is the expression and emotion on the face of the character and the essence as a reflection of a spirit that transcends expression itself.

A sombre and nostalgic air hovers over all these paintings, as if shrouded in a great transparent mantle of melancholy.

María José Salazar

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JOAN MIRÓ:

SCULPTURES 1928-1982

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20 MARCH 2 SEPTEMBER GALLERY 2 Curators: María José Salazar Joan Punyet Miró

Supported by:

His first foray into sculpture began in 1928, when his production of two-dimensional works with collage led him to three-dimensional pieces. This period signifies a turning point, a time of pursuit and change, which also lead him towards more synthetic forms.

At the beginning of World War II Joan Miró left Paris for Normandy where he remained until 1942, when he returned to Spain. These were years of isolation, loneliness and reflection on his previous experience, during which the artist dreamed of having a studio in which to paint. In 1944 he returned to sculpture, marking the beginning of his second period and the true birth of Miró as a sculptor.

View of exhibition. Successió Miró 2018

Joan Miró (1893-1983) started working with sculpture during the course of his formative years, around 1912 to 1915; it is a particularly personal and free body of work and portrays a world of its own, sometimes termed as Mironian.

Miró moved to Paris in 1920. His approach to sculpture, in terms of forms, volumes and use of a range of materials, is rooted in the Avant-Garde, and more specifically in Dadaism - with the use of everyday ready-made objects - and in Surrealism, which led him to synthesise forms while finding his idiom in the oneiric, in dreams.

His move to Mallorca, the construction of his studio by Josep Lluis Sert and the purchase of the stately home of Son Boter, also used as a studio, enables him to work in many different spaces, thus reaching a level of artistic maturity and the complete freedom of expression in the medium of sculpture. This is when he started to work with bronze. Though seemingly at odds with his personal way of working, this traditional academic material nevertheless allows him to create assemblages of found objects.

Next, came a very brief period of silence and reflection, before he returned once again to sculpture in 1962, marking the

23 JUNE, 2018 13 JANUARY, 2019 GALLERY 1 Curator: Benjamin Weil

Leonor Antunes’s Random Intersection #14 is part of an ongoing series of hanging works, whose design refers directly to horse bridles. She then connects her assemblage to the exhibition space by way of a network of hemp ropes, creating a kind of ghostly presence in the space, in contrast with the density of the surrounding architecture.

Core to Tacita Dean’s film is her epistolary exchange with British author J.G. Ballard about the curious similarities between a short story he published in 1960 and Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s famed work of Land Art, in the Great Salt Lake (Utah). The film features saline landscapes of North America and a voiceover culled from various texts by Smithson and Ballard.

Working with an oceanographer, Irene Kopelman has researched the various systems used to measure the colour and degree of transparency of bodies of water since the nineteenth century.

View of exhibition. Successió Miró 2018

beginning of what is his third phase, perhaps the most productive and personal. It was primarily based on the assemblage of materials and the transformation of found objects and fragments of nature. He lent greater importance to the use of new materials, which emboldened his imagination and led to new more balanced and poetic forms. At this time he also began to explore monumental sculpture, donning colour to his works in bronze, following advice from Giacometti.

These sculptures largely consist of improbable combinations of objects, apparently the result of chance, although nothing could be further from the truth.

Miró selected objects in a highly intuitive fashion, applying a principle of association; he divested the objects of their own identity and imbued them with a completely new character which, when combined with other objects, created a distinct form. Ultimately, he gave them a sense of overall unity through a poetic

vision of the whole. To this end, he relied on prior sketches and on photos of the assemblage for the definitive work.

In his final years of creative production, his fourth phase, Miró accepted many high-profile commissions for sculptures in public spaces in Barcelona, Madrid, Chicago, Milan and Paris, something he greatly enjoyed in his pursuit to stir up emotions in the people looking at his art.

Throughout his sculptural production, Miró engaged head-on with traditional sculpture; he sought a connection with beholders, striking up a dialogue in which his free, poetic spirit takes possession of them and transforms their vision.

A unique and one-off experience, this exhibition marks a before and after when seeking to understand Joan Miró’s language of sculpture, from his first piece dating back to 1928, to this last one, in 1982, when the artist was approaching the age of 90.

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Tacita Dean, JG (frame of the film), 2013

Depicting landscapes, whether realistic or fantasized, has been core to the practice of visual arts for centuries. Since the late nineteenth century, artists have taken new approaches to generating art forms that reflect the acceleration and the complexification of the world that surrounds them. From Impressionism to subsequent movements and then to abstraction, the past 150 years has been informed by experimentation and formal breakthroughs that rendered the profound shifts brought about by new technologies and the rise of new social structures and new utopias.

Art in the twenty-first century is rooted in the same concerns, reflecting a world that has become more chaotic and complex, as our realm becomes more multi-layered and globalized.

The idea of landscape is the common thread running through The Reconfigured Landscape, whether addressed in a literal or in a more abstract or esoteric fashion.

A landscape that is re-engineered and rethought rather than just depicted: a site to watch or to experience within the space of the exhibition, in itself a landscape of sorts. Drawn from the collection of Fundación Botín, this selection of works includes painting, drawing, sculpture, video, as well as multimedia installations, a form that perhaps epitomizes the forefront of artistic research over the past few decades. It features works by Leonor Antunes, Miroslav Balka, Lothar Baumgarten, Jacobo Castellano, Tacita Dean, Fernanda Fragateiro, Nuria Fuster, Joan Jonas, Irene Kopelman, Sol LeWitt, Julie Mehretu, João Onofre, Sara Ramo, Ignacio Uriarte, and Oriol Vilanova.

The large-scale, intricate and multi-layered compositions of Julie Mehretu often feature architectural details; they depict a world in a state of chaos, wherein antagonisms and conflicts of all kinds seem to dominate.

Joan Jonas uses wall painting to create an immersive environment that evokes a forest inhabited by birds, and stages a two-channel video performance that blends references to her extensive travel around the world with her exploration of the rural landscapes of Cantabria.

From 1977 to 1986, Lothar Baumgarten explored remote areas of South America. His photographs reflect on how Western fantasies of paradise and the lifestyle of autochthonous tribes contrast heavily with the systematic destruction of their habitat by international conglomerates. The wall painting lists the names of some of those tribes and of the territories they still occupy.

Oriol Vilanova creates a meta-landscape out of a collection of 700 postcards of cities at night, pondering the manner in which the landscape is often reduced to a tourist cliché.

Leonor Antunes, Random intersection #14 (detail), 2017.

The floor sculpture Intersection of Fernanda Fragateiro is a replica of a duckboard pathway she encountered while scouting the grounds of Ciudad Abierta, a utopian architectural experiment carried out in central Chile.

Nuria Fuster stages an effigy of Don Quixote to imbue her gathering of found objects with a theatrical plot, while at once giving this installation a landscape-like dimension. A sheet of iron serves as a relief, as does a vacuum cleaner, which blows air into the blades of an otherwise idle industrial fan that evokes the windmills in Miguel de Cervantes’s famous epic novel.

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