Murcia, April 28 (EFE).- A large part of the work of the painter Ramón Gaya is in the hands of private collections where he coexists with artists of a wide variety of types: from Rembrandt to Manet, passing through Matisse, Chillida, Herta Müller, David Hockney, Paula Rego, Antonio López and a long etcetera, as an exhibition in the museum that bears his name in Murcia shows.
The exhibition, which opens this Friday at 7:00 p.m. and which can be visited until next October, brings to light part of the funds, many of them unpublished, of the private collector Avelino Marín, who has been treasuring works of art for 48 years.
The director of the Ramón Gaya Museum, Rafael Fuster, contacted him within the framework of the research project that the artistic center is carrying out to catalog all of Gaya’s work, made up of between 4,000 and 6,000 pieces, of which in the museum there are around 500.
Marín has three works by the renowned Murcian author in his collection and, when Fuster went to see them, the collector explained to EFE, he was impressed by the volume of his collection, made up of some 1,300 pieces, not only pictorial, but also sculptural, of video, photography and installations, by authors from the 17th century to the present.
The director of the museum then proposed to him to organize an exhibition with the idea that the public could find out what kind of works and artists Gaya’s paintings coexist with outside the museums, in the numerous private collections through which his paintings are distributed.
The sample is made up of a total of 55 works on paper, a format chosen because it is the one used by the three works by Gaya (a drawing and two pastels) that Marín has, two of them never before exposed to the public.
Along with them, works on paper by great names in the history of art have been selected, among which Fuster highlights two original works in ink by Manet, an author very difficult to find in Spain, whose work is only exhibited at the Thyssen Museum.
Works by artists whose works have never been seen in the Region of Murcia, such as Matisse, David Hockney, Ronald Kitaj, Georges Valmier, Jules Pascin or Rembrandt, have also been selected.
Along with them, works by such relevant authors as Chillida, Antonio López, Bonifacio, Herta Müller, Paula Rego, Ramón Bayeu, Richard Lindner, Rainer Splitt, Enrique Atalaya, Alexandre Hollan, Rosa Torres, Leonardo Alenza, Eduardo Vicente or Adolf Schlosser, among others.
In addition, some works by Gaya’s contemporary authors and with whom the painter had a friendly relationship have been included, such as Pedro Flores, Juan Bonafé, Mariano Ballester or Pedro Serna.