Malaga,
The essential forms and materials, those derived from the earth and of primal cultures, have been the substrate, not so paradoxical, of creations of Spanish authors who, especially since the thirties, advocated an aesthetic renewal of art in our country.
Under the police station of Bárbara García Menéndez and Alberto Gil, the Carmen Thyssen museum gives them the “telluric and primitive” exhibition, which opens its doors on October 7 and that reviews how creators linked to very diverse currents were those who defended a break with the academic tradition prior to the civil war, from those parameters, individual and collective work and the influence of avant -garde such as avant -garde informalism; and how his work would have continuity and influence in the following decades.
The look at the earth served to deploy their own Natural works With unsuspected results, as well as their knowledge of cave paintings and the art of indigenous peoples. They were interested, in any case, the absolute origin; To use ancestral communication signs and the subject of which the primary environment is made.
This exhibition consists of sixty works – between paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and engravings – and its presentation is articulated in two sections, attending to the most attention of the artists gathered to the telluric or the primitive, although we will appreciate that these paths will constant spells and onirismo.
In a first section, centered on telluric, figuration begins to dissipate in favor of an abstraction that will triumph in Spain later, and the entrails of the land become roots of yerms fields, but also of fantastic scenarios, of biomorphic beings and street rocks or living sculptures. His materials are not always expected: we will see pieces made with fabrics or objects found.
They have a place in this chapter authors of the essential School of Vallecas (Benjamín Palencia, Nicolás de Lekuona, Alberto Sánchez) and artists who orbital around surrealism, with greater or lesser closeness (Joan Miró, Óscar Domínguez, Esteban French, José Moreno Villa, Maruja Mallo), whose landscapes sprouted both from the earth and of dreams.
From these renewed ties between art and geology he saw the light a poetic of the essential that would extend to artists who worked fundamentally in the postwar period, such as Ortega Muñoz; To those who since the fifties were the informalist austerity, such as Juana Francés, Palazuelo, César Manrique, Gustavo Torner, Eduardo Chillida, Manolo Millares, Antoni Tàpies or Josep Guinovart; Already creators who, in recent decades, have also worked from matter and exploration of land and materials used in agricultural activities. Among the latter, the Thyssen has summoned the recently deceased Juan Luis Goenaga, Miquel Barceló, Soledad Sevilla, Aurèlia Muñoz and Teresa Lanceta.
The section linked to primitivism marks distances with the exploration of African and oceanic creations by the drivers of the avant -garde germinated in Paris.
He emphasizes the development of Spanish abstraction in the fifties and its different and normally primitive sources: the strokes of the Altamira caves (Ángel Ferrant, Mathias Goeritz, Picasso, Santiago Lagunas, Fermín Aguayo); the culture of the Guanches for the most overlapping in the Canarian context (Millares, Martín Chirino); the dream and the unconscious conceived as primitive states of the mind (Modest Cuixart, Tàpies); Klee’s schematic abstraction (Eusebi Sempere, Pablo Palazuelo) or an informalism that drank from pass Arts others (Antonio Saura, and again Chirino, Chillida, Millares, Tàpies, Manrique, Luis Feito and Rafael Canogar).
Most of them turned signs, geometries and forms purified in their alphabet: in canvases whose appearance was quite resembled that of soils and walls, for housing marks that could perfectly have executed any hand in full freedom, or that of the first creator who had a blank canvas in front of himself.
In their wake, who from the seventies did not move away from abstraction also made in some cases (Miquel Barceló) of the earth and its depths, their texture and disorder, the starting point of their compositions.
“Telluric and primitive. From Vallecas School to Miquel Barceló”
Carmen Thyssen Málaga Museum
C/ Company, 10
Malaga
From October 7, 2025 to March 1, 2026
