Pamplona,
About to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2025, the University of Navarra Museum has decided to offer an extensive exhibition to its own collections: it is the first exhibition it hosts focused on its collection and has a thousand works, dating back to over two centuries, between paintings, sculptures, photographs and video installations.
Valentín Vallhonrat and Ignacio Miguéliz would curate this project, which can be visited until next August and which highlights the two fundamental milestones in the creation of this group: the start of the collection with the donation, in 1981, of José Ortiz Echagüe’s photographs to the University of Navarra (1,400 direct carbon prints, 1,500 paper negatives and 28,800 negatives, in addition to its library and archive), and the one made by María Josefa Huarte, in 2008, from her collection of contemporary art, under the premise that A museum was built to house it, as would happen seven years later. In the four decades since then, the MUN has continued to enrich these legacies with new funds, acquisitions, programs for the development of unpublished work and other donations; Another important chapter, before it opened its doors to the public, was the ideation of the center’s collection by Rafael Levenfeld and the aforementioned Valentín Vallhonrat in the nineties: it was then established that this space would seek to delve deeper into the evolution of collection procedures. construction of images as a means to interpret reality and in the analysis of the photographic discipline as a document and as art at the same time.
In the words of Vallhonrat, each piece that has entered the collection has done so for a reason: relates to other pieces and can raise a rich life experience in relation to freedom and knowledge and with the function of art to offer us spaces that we do not reach, and that are ours.
The exhibition tour begins by presenting almost fifty pieces donated by Huarte and dated between the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, a selection that includes Kandinsky, Rothko and Picasso and is completed with a set of works later incorporated into the MUN collections and belonging to figurative and abstract artists, both in the informalist and geometric aspects of this style, without losing sight of authors close to the aesthetics of the wall. A second section, focused on photography and images by Ortiz Echagüe, will allow the public to learn about the daguerreotype and calotype techniques and, likewise, proposals developed by the authors who have joined the program. build bridgeswhich was inaugurated by Joan Fontcuberta (with Orogenesisa series derived from his study of an album about Gibraltar from the 19th century also belonging to this center), and videographic or video installation pieces, among which those by Carlos Irijalba and Daniel Canogar stand out. A separate chapter has been given to the collections, under development at the Museum, related to photography in the Middle East and Latin America.
As a continuation, the exhibition ends by examining the possibilities achieved with the techniques of wet collodion and albumen paper, the early pictorialist movement in photography, the later avant-gardes in this field in Spain, the documentary image typical of the first third of the last century, propaganda, advertising and photojournalism during the Civil War and the evolution in multiple directions of this art in recent decades, approaching other disciplines or deploying itself in new formats. In this outcome, there is no shortage of names such as Pierre Gonnord, Bleda y Rosa, Manolo Laguillo or Roland Fischer.
Beyond the technical, this exhibition allows us to review the diversity of themes addressed by Spanish photographers in the broad temporal arc analyzed: from architecture and urban planning to art, history, portraiture, popular types, psychology or the relationship between science and creation.
Special mention deserves the presence here of Pablo Palazuelo, a fundamental artist in the collections of the Pamplona museum and in the evolution of our geometric abstraction: convinced that nature is articulated through mathematical figures and lines and originates from a creative divinity, he did not stop employ this type of forms in his compositions, both pictorial and sculptural. In the first ones, he progressively used greater sobriety in his palette. He shared disciplines and attention to the geometric framework with Sempere, although the latter approached kineticism; In this case, his works are close to those of Aitor Ortiz, whose images are based on planes and light. Speaking of abstraction, we must not forget this project by Elena Asins, who dedicated her pieces to the search for a fourth dimension and the notion of the impossible even though she undertook them, in the beginning, from computer science.
Also represented in the montage are his teacher José Luis Alexanco, who used the possibilities that computing offered him to illuminate figures that he then moved by rotating them on their axis; Luis Gordillo, who often uses the photo as a starting point for his processes, in which he repeats shapes and alters colors and textures; or Luis González Palma, who reinterprets symbols and gestures and approaches the religious fact from a cultural perspective.
In the collections of the Navarrese museum, classified by disciplines, we can also delve deeper through its own portal: https://coleccionmun.unav.edu/
“University of Navarra Museum Collection. “Four decades”
UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRA MUSEUM
University Campus, s/n
Pamplona
From September 24, 2024 to August 24, 2025
