Josefa Tolrà (1880-1959), Pepeta, was an illiterate peasant from Cabrils, who at the age of sixty began to draw and write as an antidote to the sadness she fell into after the death of her son in a concentration camp during the Civil War (before he had lost another, 14 years old). “Only when I draw do I feel at peace”, she said. Coinciding in time, but many kilometers away, the Londoner Magde Gill (1882-1961) took refuge in drawing, embroidery and music to get out of the pain and feeling of disaster, trauma and adversity that caused her death. of one of their children because of the Spanish flu of 1918. A year later, their only daughter was stillborn.
Neither of them had the restlessness or arrogance to call themselves artists. Nor did they ever think of marketing their works. They were creative women, and visionaries. Mediums who, in trance states, reproduced the words or images dictated to them by beings from the afterlife. Tolrà and Gill never met, nor did they ever know of the existence of the other, but visiting The Guided Hand, the fascinating exhibition that brings them together at the MNAC until November 5, it is not always easy to find out which of the two each corresponds to. One of the works exhibited. “They did not create with an aesthetic or commercial intention, but both went to the essence and origin of art,” says its curator Pilar Bonet, historian and member of the pioneering group Visionary Women Art.
In less than a decade, the time that has elapsed since Bonet herself rescued her from oblivion in an exhibition in Mataró, Josefa Tolrà –who in her day captivated the artists of Dau al Set: Brossa, Cuixart, Tàpies– has gone from being a great unknown to occupy its own space in the central exhibition of the last Venice Biennale and to be part of the collections of the Macba, the Prado or the Pompidou. And the same can be said of Magde Gill, whose work is about to enter the Tate collections.
“But their recognition does not come so much from art historians, museums or academia… It is the public, especially the younger generations, that have brought these artists who emit pacifist messages and speak from the surface. of love, of care, of saving the planet… and they have learned everything from nature”, considers Bonet, for whom both women practice a “secular, punk spirituality, which fascinates young people a lot”.
Josefa Tolrà said that she transmitted what the ‘beings of light’ told her. She barely knew how to speak Spanish but in her notebooks she expresses herself perfectly in that language and she writes poetry. She doesn’t have any academic training but she is able to articulate speeches about history, science or philosophy. She never left Cabrils, she only went to Badalona once to visit a medium, but she talks about distant countries like Lebanon and paints the Congo jungle. In his drawings there are scenes of customs, but also portraits of historical figures such as Marconi, Jacint Verdaguer and Napoleon.
Magde Gill, an illegitimate child, was sent to an orphanage at the age of nine, despite the fact that her mother was alive. Then, at the age of 14, she was sent to Canada to work as a domestic worker. Upon her return, her cousin married, but the deaths of her children brought her greater anguish. He believed his talents were controlled by a supernatural guiding spirit he called Myrninerest and his drawings, which, like Pepeta’s show “what the eyes cannot see”, are the fruit of his determination to stay alive, to make sense of things. all his suffering.
The result is wonderful and moving works, like everything that comes from another world, and at the MNAC they can be seen together in different rooms, as if they were domestic interiors, separated by translucent walls that evoke “an amniotic membrane”.
