Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga: Telúricos y primitivos

This exhibition offers a choral narrative that explores, through evocative concepts such as the telluric and the primitive, certain idiosyncratic keys to 20th-century Spanish art in its search for its own avant-garde.

The desire for rupture and renewal in various trends since the 1930s, among which it is possible to recognise elective affinities, stems from a common desire to re-establish artistic language, going back to an ancestral, primordial, essential or visceral origin of pictorial or sculptural expression, with forms that emerge from the earth and its elemental essences or from the freest imagination of a creator transmuted into a demiurge.

Interest in geology, cave painting and pure painting are presented here as leitmotifs of the visual arts in Spain during much of the 20th century. From the pioneers of increasingly less realistic and canonical figurative art during the years of the Republic and Spanish abstraction during the Franco regime, the discourse will cover thus the artistic research of numerous earthy and primitive artists who, as a group, in broader movements or strictly individually, resorted to specific languages to reveal the essence of nature and art, and offer it as a new beginning for avant-garde artistic expression.

The Fundació Suñol is collaborating in this exhibition by loaning the following work from the Suñol Soler Collection:

Martín Chirino. Laberintia III, 1978