The MUREC exhibits the work of Cristina Megía in the last decade

The latest author, young and realist, to join the exhibition program of the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. MUREC from Almería, sharing rooms with María Moreno, is Cristina Megía from La Mancha. From tomorrow until October we will be able to visit there “The Dog, the Boy and the Closed Eyes”, a compendium of forty oil paintings, preparatory sketches and drawings that she has carried out in the last decade and in whose selection the artist has participated, together with the curators Juan Manuel Martín Robles and Francisco Copado Carralero.

It is not so much a retrospective as a tour of pieces of diverse genres – landscapes, portraits, museum interiors and still lifes – which, however, can be related to each other: they have in common Megía’s desire to capture frozen moments, sometimes in an almost cinematic sense, and to make slow observation a poetic experience. The landscapes play a central role in the route; Nature has always been present in her production, but especially in the last five years it has been a primary territory for her, as a work environment, for the silence and calm it allows, and as a theme. This growing taste for uninhabited enclaves had to do, in his case and in that of so many, with the pandemic and the need to glimpse something of ours lost in uninhabited spaces.

It focuses, fundamentally, on solitary or abandoned places, in which we will not find objects or figures to take as a point of reference and which therefore escape a narrative gaze, not meditation, sought through light, atmospheres and the careful use of pictorial material in favor of intimacy. Megía does not intend to faithfully represent specific points, but rather to evoke emotions or states of mind with them.

Cristina Megía. Make foot on land2024

Cristina Megía. Waterfall2025

We have denied narrativity in these compositions, but the title of the exhibition could point to it. the dog and the boy We will find them in two of the canvases on display: their presence is rare in this author’s work and they constitute a metaphor for a painting with which she does not wish to offer immediate answers, but rather to arouse the viewer’s curiosity and generate new spaces for the imagination or memory. On this path, Megía does not escape the influence of tradition, always from contemporary perspectives: the classical masters favored, as she wishes, rest in visual examination and reflection beyond appearances.

Graduated in Art History and Fine Arts, she openly admires Flemish painting and Sánchez Cotán, Manet, Morandi, Hopper and Balthus, but above all she has sought to build her own voice through the treatment of pictorial matter. In previous years, he has offered individual shows at the Palacio de la Madraza and the Palacio de los Condes de Gabia in Granada or the Galería Silvestre in Madrid.