Juana Francés (1924-1990) saw herself as the painter of solitude. Her characters do not fight or rebel, and in her immobility they evoke man’s anguish in the face of a threatening world. In one of her best-known paintings, an enigmatic character covers his mouth with his hand, as if, stunned by horror, he did not dare to express what he feels or had nothing to say. The work, which is titled El silencio, will be part of ¿Qué humanity? Existential Figurations in the Postwar (1940-1966), an ambitious exhibition that will bring together at the MNAC around a hundred works by Catalan, Spanish and international artists who, after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, took up figuration to represent the new wounded humanity.
Along with Francés, there will be Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Tàpies, Mercè Rodoreda, Picasso, Henry Moore, Giacometti, Francis Bacon… An impressive list of artists with whom the Museu Nacional will evoke a world “that unfortunately is projected on a present”, marked by the sensation of generalized crisis and brutal wars such as the one in Ukraine, says its director, Pepe Serra. The exhibition, from October 26 to January 11, will be the culmination of a year whose exhibitions will have as their theme the humanity in crisis and, in the most theoretical field, will review its own history, sometimes problematic and in any case never fully investigated.
“Thinking about expanding is impossible if we don’t even know how we got here, the political and cultural history behind it,” considers Serra, who has commissioned different specialists to study what happened when the Francoists took over the institution from 1939 and “a museum that started in the Romanesque and ended in the contemporary, suddenly split in two and a second museum appears in Ciutadella. I am convinced that dividing it up was part of a repression plan, but it is not known who or how did it”, adds Serra.
Another of the outstanding exhibitions of the season will feature two women who were never recognized as artists -the Catalan Josefa Tolrà (1880-1950) and Madge Gill (1882-1961)- but whose wonderful visionary works today occupy a central place in biennials and museums around the world. The Guided Hand, which is the title of the exhibition, is curated by Pilar Bonet, a great scholar and responsible for the international projection of Tolrà, a humble peasant woman from Cabrils whose drawings once captivated artists such as .Brossa, Cuixart and Tàpies, and critics like Cirici-Pellicer. (From 6/VII to 15/X)
And another woman artist, in this case a contemporary, Laia Estruch, will occupy the Oval Room in summer with a gigantic sound sculpture made up of tubes (25 meters long and 2 meters in diameter) that will be activated by visitors. The exhibition proposal will be completed with the exhibition of two of her latest donations: the Anglada Camarasa Archive (9 / II to 7 / V) and the collection of the photographer Pere Formiguera (second semester). In the field of comics, in April she will present El museo (Editorial Norma), a graphic novel by Jorge Carrión y Sagar, which talks about art and life in each of its corners.
This 2023, coinciding with the centenary of the rediscovery and uprooting of the Romanesque wall paintings, the core of the collection and of the museum itself, will launch various projects, including an international congress that will bring specialists to Vall de Boí. “We lack resources, personnel and country, that people create this museum,” laments Serra, who summons the press to a future meeting to talk about the future museum (he prefers not to talk about expansion) in the Fira pavilion. It will also be then when there will be news about the contribution of the Government of Madrid (will they be good or bad? “There will be”, he answers) and he assures that he still does not know the budget he has for this year (15,673,000 in 2022) but Yes, the Generalitat will increase its contribution by 20%.
