Let’s leave the Picasso Celebration behind and immerse ourselves fully in the Tàpies Year. As it could not be otherwise, the 100-year anniversary of the artist’s birth will mark the 2024 exhibition agenda at Articket museums, which includes other stimulating plans for a year of art and culture in capital letters, featuring such artists as Henri Matisse, Agnès Varda, Chiharu Shiota, Mari Chordà, Eveli Torent, Suzanne Valadon and Fernande Olivier. If you want to know what awaits you this 2024, read on!
A great retrospective on Antoni Tàpies
Fundació Antoni Tàpies will be the third site in a row where Manuel Borja-Villel will organise the exhibition on the work of Antoni Tàpies as part of the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the artist’s birth. The retrospective exhibit will feature a wide selection on works coming from museums and private national and international collections, covering the artist’s extensive career between 1943 and 2011. You will be able to reconnect with works that have remained dispersed and isolated from the creative periods in which they emerged for a long time, providing the opportunity to recover and examine in depth the formal and artistic concerns that gave Tàpies such dazzling results throughout his career.
The paradoxical link between Miró and Matisse at Fundació Joan Miró
At first glance, bringing these two artists together may seem paradoxical. They belong to two different generations (Matisse was born in 1869 and Miró was born in 1893). They are generally associated with different artistic environments (fauvism in the case of Matisse and surrealism in the case of Miró) and different aesthetic approaches (the “decorative” harmony of Matisse and the disturbing strangeness of Miró). However, the exhibition at Fundació Joan Miró will aim to show the deep, lasting and constructive relationships between both artists, their conceptions of art and their works. MiróMatisse: beyond images will undoubtedly be an exhibition to challenge clichés.
With female name(s)
Fortunately, women artists are taking up more visible spaces in museums. Indeed, 2024 will be a year full of inspiring female names.
At CCCB, you can enjoy an exhibit on the work of the great photographer and filmmaker Agnès Varda, who died recently. Two generations of essential artists, Mari Chordà and Teresa Solar, will also have their place at the MACBA. The enigmatic and contemplative facilities of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota will occupy the rooms of Fundació Tàpies in Threads of Memory, all in dialogue with Tàpies’ work. The emblematic impressionist painter Suzanne Valadon, one of the pioneers of her discipline, will feature in an exhibition at the MNAC in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Musée de Nantes. Finally, the Museu Picasso will host a monographic exhibition of Fernande Olivier’s work that will include unpublished documents and portraits of artists such as Kees Van Dongen and Joaquim Sunyer.
Jews and converts at the Museu Nacional
The MNAC will open a new set of exhibitions with The Lost Mirror: Jews and Converts in the Middle Ages. Organised in collaboration with the Museo del Prado, the exhibit will delve deeper into the role that images played in the relations between Jews and Christians in Spain from 1285 to 1492 and will magnify the use of art to encourage the conversion of the Jews. It is an exhibition about the past with an eye on the present.
Eveli Torent and other Catalan pioneers in Paris
We continue with the Museu Nacional, which also aims to restore the figure of Eveli Torent, a little-known painter and illustrator with an amazing personality and career. His first steps in the art world were linked to the environment of Els 4 Gats, a crucial epicentre of Catalan Art Nouveau, where he would meet the most senior promoters of modernity and share the yearnings of the emerging generation that would succeed them.
Like other contemporary artists, Torent travelled to Paris to settle at the turn of the century. Indeed, one of the highlights of the programming of the Museu Picasso will be an exhibition on different aspects of the Catalan artists who travelled to Paris between the Universal Exhibition of 1889 and the outbreak of the First World War. From Montmartre to Montparnasse (1889-1914): Catalan artists in Paris will bring together works by Picasso, Rusiñol, Casas, Nonell, Pichot, Anglada Camarasa and others.
The Amazon and the suburbs at the CCCB
Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents a cultural history of American suburbia, exploring the different political implications of their establishment, the ecological consequences of their dependence on fossil fuels and the gender-related and racial contrasts that have punctuated a historical background where segregation and gender assignments served hegemonic discourses.
Amazonias. The Ancestral Future addresses the strategic importance of the preservation of the Amazon region at a global level. Among other things, it proposes a fully immersive itinerary that lets visitors hear the sounds of the jungle thanks to the latest sound research and delve into the new universes designed especially for the CCCB facilities by creators from local communities.
