San Sebastián (EFE).- The art of the past and the present come together in the new exhibition at the Tabakalera center in San Sebastián, which has brought together some of the masterpieces from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum to propose a story “about art and memory”, a new look at art that, despite the passing of time, will remain in the future.
The exhibition, “That Time”, which takes its name from a play by Samuel Beckett of the same title, translated into Spanish as “Aquella vez”, has eschewed the conventional chronological order of some exhibitions to establish a natural relationship between artists as disparate as El Greco, Oscar Dominguez, Francis Bacon, and Elena Asins.
Goya, Zurbarán, Leger, Chillida, Cy Twombly, Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Txomin Badiola and Josep Beuys are part of the 76 artists who sign the 107 works of “That Time”, which can be visited from this Friday until November 5, and that this afternoon the lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, will inaugurate.
Collaboration between Tabakalera and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
Tabakalera, in its first and great collaboration with the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, currently immersed in its expansion, has broken symbolic and physical walls.
As an international center for contemporary art, it has accommodated works from other centuries, and to give meaning to an exhibition projected in a circular route, it has communicated rooms that had never been joined before and that total 1,500 square meters.
It has done so on its first floor, where this Thursday the director of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Miguel Zugaza, and the general director of Tabakalera, Edurne Ormazabal, have presented the exhibition, the result of “months of joint work”, to which Three pieces produced expressly by the San Sebastian center for this cultural event are incorporated, by the artists Ainara Legardon, Ilke Gears and Jorge Moneo.
They are the most recent creations. The oldest is a stone male bust from the 2nd century and an anonymous author. Between one extreme and the other, time blurs to reposition the chosen artists in three voices – those of old age, maturity and youth – outside of chronologies.
Busts of Durrio, De Torre or Clará
Eleven busts of artists such as Francisco Durrio, Quintin de Torre and Josep Clará welcome the visitor.
Along with these pieces, among which is an abstract effigy of Joséphine Baker made by Eduardo Arroyo and another of Aurelio Arteta sculpted by Vitorio Macho from Palencia, a series of “sound brushstrokes” by Ainara Legardon are distributed, with which the creator Basque gives “voice” to bodies that do not have it.
In a reverse route, you access the first room, the “Voice C” of old age, where you can see works by authors such as Vicente Ameztoy, Ibon Aranberri, Bonifacio, Marta Cárdenas, Juan Luis Goenaga, Susana Talayero and Cy Twombly, that “recreate a bygone and archaic but not finished time, in which ‘what was’ has not yet completely gone”, as explained by the curators of the exhibition, Miriam Alzuri and Oier Etxeberria.
And “the enigmas of a secularized present”, such as “El cazador”, by Óscar Domínguez, and “Figure lying in a mirror”, by Francis Bacon, coexist with allusions to the divine that represent a “Saint John at the foot of the cross ” anonymous from the 14th century or “Saint Francis in prayer”, by El Greco.
maturity in the present tense
The second room, that of the “Voice A”, of maturity, is that of the present time, “where the imperatives of the technological and industrial society” are manifested in the painting of artists such as Vicente Cutanda, Celso Lagar, Daniel Vázquez Díaz , Aurelio Arteta, Agustin Ibarrola and June Crespo.
“Technology and factory energy as powerful creative forces” are represented by works by Anthony Caro, Mari Puri Herrero, Idoia Montón, and “war and its consequences as powerful collateral damage” have among their exponents the “Portrait of the poet Moratón”, by Goya, one of the last paintings by the Aragonese painter, made in his exile from Bordeaux.
The creations of Txomin Badiola, Markus Lüpertz, Miren Arenzana and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva speak of the future tense. They meet in “Voice B”, that of youth, where they renew their gaze on the painting “La Santa Faz” by Zurbarán or the monumental relief by Nemesio Mogrobejo, confronted with a spectacular tapestry by Fernad Léger.
This exhibition of the works of the Fine Arts outside its usual setting is quite an experience for the Biscayan art gallery. It also exhibits three works never exhibited -by Susana Solano, Idoia Monzón and Iñaki Garmendia-. “This new process is very useful for us to rebuild the institution from the present day”, highlighted Zugaza.