Eusebio Sempere turns 101 years old at the IVAM. After the celebration of the Sempere Year, on the occasion of its centenary, the Institut València d’Art Modern, in collaboration with the MACA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante that owes so much to the artist from Onil, has presented the exhibition ‘Simpere in Paris’ in which, for the first time, an essential stage in the training of the painter and sculptor from Alicante, who died in 1985, is focused on: his stay in Paris from 1948 to 1960.
“A fundamental stage in Sempere’s work had never been influenced in this way, since it was in Paris where he became an artist,” said Rosa Castells, curator and head of the MACA collections, who knows the work inside out and Sempere’s life history.
And it was in that Parisian period “when he delves into geometric abstraction while building his own artistic vocabulary that is reflected in two fundamental series in his career: the Paris gouaches and his luminous reliefs,” he explained.
The exhibition brings together more than 70 works about Sempere’s stay in Paris “where he arrived with the intention of getting to know modernity and where he lived through difficult times, despite the small successes,” explained Sonia Martínez, deputy director of the IVAM.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, March 14 at the Julio González Center. “The complete set of Paris gouaches is made up of almost a hundred works. And here we exhibit a total of 57,” Rosa Castells detailed. The majority of those hundred are in public collections, with the IVAM with 23 and the MACA with 62 who treasure the work that Sempere develops in Paris “quietly and silently.” They are “simple, emotional and naive works that become more complicated, seeking volume, depth and movement,” she highlighted.
In addition, nine luminous reliefs are shown, a type of artifact with electrical installation that simulates movement through the different alternately illuminated planes where the geometric shapes are cut out. Although most of the works that make up the exhibition come from the MACA and IVAM collections, works from the Provincial Council of Valencia, the Mediterranean Foundation, the Patio Herreriano Museum or the MUBAG, among others, are also on display.
The exhibition also includes the first pieces that Sempere made in Paris and around 70 unpublished documents, among which stands out his correspondence with other artists such as Julio González, with the singer and cuplet player Raquel Meller, with his teacher Alfons Roig, with the critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni and with Loló Soldevilla, the Cuban painter and cultural attaché of the Cuban Embassy in Paris with whom he had a loving and professional relationship.
The selection of documentation in the exhibition, which includes scrapbooks, texts by the artist, press material, photographs and letters, shows this universe of social relationships that Sempere maintained in Paris and that are the basis of his personality. The documents come from the IVAM and MACA Archives, the Alfons Roig Archive of the MUVIM, the Mediterranean Foundation, as well as the Library and Documentation Center of the Reina Sofia Museum.
