As a follow-up to the 5th Anniversary exhibition held in 2012 under eight headings, the smaller-scale CONTINUUM now shows a selection of works of the Josep Suñol Collection that take a look over the last ninety years of artistic creation and offers an excellent platform for thinking about 20th-century art.
Through a selection of pieces created by national and international artists (Achille Perilli, Richard Avedon, Eduardo Arroyo, Man Ray, Jaume Plensa, Robert Llimós, Alighiero Boetti, Alberto García-Alix, Andy Warhol, Roman Buxbaum, José Noguero, Darío Villalba, Lucio Fontana, Giacomo Balla, Luis Lugán, Antoni Abad, Antonio Saura, Zush, Miquel Barceló, Jordi Sabaté, Isidre Manils, Antoni Tàpies and Sergi Aguilar) using different media (sculpture, photography, tapestry, painting, printing and mixed techniques), the visitor will have to live through his own experience, interacting between him itself as observant, the artist and his proposed work, and to think about the different approaches to a certain artistic subject matter, trying to admit this way the limits of the visual arts across the thought. The works in this exhibition create a whole host of interconnected communicative acts that explain the creative process behind the continuum of the visual arts over time and in the different forms they take.
Why is a face represented full face or in profile? What is it looking at? What moment is being captured? Why was one technique used rather than another? What is the purpose of a given composition? Why an artist writes on a surface as if his writing were seeking to reinforce the work’s simple materiality? How is it revealed on a canvas a dreamlike situation full of magical images that take us to the disturbing, unknown atmosphere of dreams? How do we figure out the expressionism from a work of art?
CONTINUUM’s aim is to set out the principles and interests that led Josep Suñol to bring together, exhibit and explain his collection of contemporary art over the last six years, through an intense itinerary over the most important artistic movements of the last century.
Opening: April 18th, 2013, 19.00
Curated by: Fundació Suñol
The Fundació Suñol’s exhibition Pablo Picasso. La Tauromàquia [Pablo Picasso. Tauromachy] presents a work with texts by José Delgado, alias Pepe Illo, illustrated with 26 aquatints by Pablo Picasso. It was published in 1959 by Gustau Gili, as part of his Ediciones de la Cometa collection. José Delgado (Seville, 1754 – Madrid, 1801) was a bullfighter and also author of the treatise La Tauromaquia o Arte de Torear [Tauromachy or the Art of Bullfighting] published in Cádiz in 1796.
Picasso’s relationship with the world of bullfighting dates back to his childhood, when he would often accompany his father to the bullfights in the bullring in Málaga. His fascination with bulls and the world of bullfighting stayed with him for his whole life and became a recurrent theme in his work, exploring dualities such as love/eroticism, violence/purity, executioner/victim and light/shade, amongst others.
Picasso’s series of aquatints set out the sequence of steps in a bullfight, from the picture of the bulls lying down in a meadow to the bullfighter being gored in the bullring. In each of them the artist reduces the tension of the spectacle by stylising the figures of the bulls, picadors and bullfighters with extremely subtle dynamic movement; and his fast, tense hand testifies to the action in the bullring.
The process for publishing La Tauromaquia got under way in 1926, when Gustau Gili i Roig contacted Pablo Picasso to offer him the opportunity to illustrate one of the new books in his Ediciones de la Cometa collection. After a flurry of letters and a series of interviews, Picasso agreed to illustrate the book on the art of bullfighting written centuries before by José Delgado, very probably inspired by the bullfighting etchings by Goya, whom Picasso deeply admired.
The publishing process came to a halt for no apparent reason in 1930 and it was only almost thirty years later, in 1956, that Gustau Gili i Esteve picked up the conversations with Picasso to complete the project begun by his father.
The ties between Gustau Gili i Esteve and Picasso were more than strictly professional and their friendship grew stronger over the years. Gili played a key role in helping set up the Picasso Museum in Barcelona in 1963 and in Jacqueline Picasso’s later donation of a sizeable amount of the artist’s work to the museum’s collections.
There were 263 copies of this collector’s edition printed, along with the corresponding sugar-lift aquatints, which were printed at the Lacourière-Frélaut presses in Paris, with Picasso, Jacqueline and Jaume Sabartés.
The paper was specially made by Guarro and brought to Paris from Barcelona; it included a bull’s head watermark designed by the artist himself [photograph 4]. For the cover, Picasso made a drypoint engraving, printed at Jaume Pla’s presses in Barcelona, featuring a kite, the symbol of Gili’s Ediciones de la Cometa collection. The texts were printed at the Sociedad Alianza de Artes Gráficas (SADAG) presses in Barcelona on 25 October 1959.
This exhibition at the Fundació Suñol pays tribute to Pablo Picasso forty years after his death. It aims to reveal his extraordinary ability to absorb and turn a personal experience into something universal.
