So it was... Red Itiner 2023

Josep Coll (Barcelona, ​​1924-1984) is considered by many critics and specialists —and, without a doubt, by his admirers— as one of the best cartoonists of the Spanish XNUMXth century, and there are many who extend this recognition to the European and global level.

In 1949 he joined TBO, the magazine that gave its name to all comics, and became one of its pillars. He regularly contributed his originals until 1964, when, for financial reasons, he stopped his collaboration to dedicate himself to the family profession that he had started in as a teenager: bricklaying. Some have seen this abandonment of the comics profession - which, fortunately, was not total - as one of the greatest editorial errors of XNUMXth century Spain.

Although he died early at age 60, Coll is still alive. He lives on in the memory of those who enjoyed his comics in the OBT and today he is recognized by the new generations of comic book artists. In a survey carried out in March 2021 by the magazine "Rock de Lux" among cartoonists and experts to choose the hundred best Spanish comics, he ranked fifth, after Carlos Giménez, Kim/Altarriba, Ibáñez and Nazario. It is the best position achieved by a deceased cartoonist whose work is practically not published. The purpose of this exhibition was to have him discovered - and rediscovered - by all fans of the eighth art.

Commissar: Luis Garbayo Erviti

The platform How to be a Photographer was born in 2021 in order to show the active and creative role that contemporary female photographers have assumed, without which the art scene would be completely disfigured.

""On Stage" was an exhibition that offered an extensive catalogue of the work of twenty Ibero-American female photographers with a solid professional career. The aim of this heterogeneous exhibition was to raise awareness of the value that photography by women has achieved today, so that the cultural panorama can incorporate this fundamental element to understand the contemporary art scene. Thanks to the contributions of these 21st-century artists, who presented plural identities and styles, the photography scene is exponentially enriched, and the broad spectrum of the proposals selected for this exhibition demonstrated the active participation of these creators today.

Curator: Martha Soul

In 1945, Jean Dubuffet coined the term art brut: art marginal to culture, discovered in extremely singular works; expression of interior worlds foreign to any purpose, except to obey only themselves.

Psychiatric hospitals were the first source of art brut. Four decades later, attention was directed towards people with intellectual disabilities and the first assisted art studios emerged in Europe and America.

In a Strange Land brought together a selection of works by artists belonging to the Estudio Debajo del Sombrero (2007), a project aimed at professionally incorporating into contemporary art the intuitions contained in the languages ​​of artists with intellectual disabilities, which includes 42 artists, some of whom have sparked the interest of museums, galleries, private collections and international contemporary art biennials. Cultural institutions vigilant for signs of an unprecedented and unnoticed order of thought.

The exhibition brought us a fragment of that thinking that is just emerging, without reason or reasons to rely on, in total defenselessness. A newborn creature, bearer of its own beauty. Strange beauty, of non-aesthetic origin, whose mere proximity makes one feel that thought is simply dawning.

Curatorship: under the hat

The novel "Genji Monogatari", written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu in 1006, is the most important work of Japanese literature and represents the classic aesthetic values ​​of Japanese culture. Its protagonist, Prince Genji, is the archetype of ancient Japanese gallantry: elegant, cultured, sentimental and seductive. Genji masters all the arts, poetry, music, dance; he has good taste in dressing, in choosing a gift, and is able to resolve any situation with ingenuity.

In the XNUMXth century there were writers who made parodies and plays about their adventures. The prints illustrating his most famous episodes multiplied and the ones preferred by the public were those made by the Utagawa school, represented in this exhibition with works by great artists such as Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, Kunisada II, Yoshiiku and Kunichika. At the end of that century, Ogata Gekkō, one of the last masters of the ukiyo-e, nostalgically recovered the classicism of the original story.

This exhibition traces the influence of Prince Genji on the art of Japanese printmaking through a selection of fifty original works by the most prominent artists.

Commissar: David Almazan

Ways of seeing. satellite perspective The exhibition brought together a selection of 23 works from the collection of the Alberto Jiménez-Arellano Alonso Foundation of the University of Valladolid. Founded in 2004 by the couple Ana Alonso Cuadrado and Alberto Jiménez-Arellano Guajardo, the contemporary art collection is made up of more than two hundred pieces that are currently not on display to the public.

The exhibition proposed a journey through the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century through works by Cristina Alabau, Illán Argüello, Ricardo Cadenas, Carmen Calvo, Ceesepe, José Manuel Ciria, Juan Cuéllar Costa, Damián Flores, Ana de Alvear, Dis Berlín, Patricia Gadea, Jorge Galindo, Abraham Lacalle, Ángel Mateo Charris, Joël Mestre, Teresa Moro, Marina Núñez, Bernardí Roig, Mar Solís, Jorge Tarazona, Teresa Tomás and Concha Ybarra.

This is not a unitary or compact tour. The aim was to show how various Spanish artists respond to the problems of contemporary language from their own perspectives, using as a guiding thread the satellite perspective that allowed Patricia Gadea to see things from outside the world and us to see contemporary art from outside the centre.

Curator: Hurtado Mountain

This exhibition project highlighted the connection between fanzines (self-managed publications) and culture. do it yourself with the party and the subcultures. Likewise, it presents to the viewer the prominence that these social, cultural and/or artistic manifestations can have in the museum.

Articulated through a selection of pieces of different kinds - including photographs, sculptures and installations - it was a round trip between the party and the fanzine and offered a tour of works from the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles and fanzines by contemporary artists.

Curatorship: Clara Neches Sanz, Andrea Martín Castro, Manuela Muñoz Cossio, Manuel Padín Fernández, Natalia de la Piedra González and Rita Zamora Amengual (DIDDCC Working Group of the CA2M Museum).

In the career of José Luis López Vázquez (1922-2009) everything is huge figures. If to the 262 films in which he participated as an actor we add the titles in which he intervened in other departments, the number will increase more than notably. By counting his prolific theatrical career and his numerous television appearances and commercials, we arrive at a volume that allows us to affirm that the Madrid actor is one of the most prolific in history.  

This exhibition, which paid tribute to the actor on the occasion of his centenary, showed for the first time a large amount of unpublished material, mostly from the private collection of his first-born son José Luis López Magerus. From his first works as a cartoonist to the Honorary Goya awarded to him by the Spanish Film Academy in 2005, José Luis López Vázquez's career takes us from post-war theatre to XNUMXs Hollywood, and includes milestones such as his collaborations with Luis García Berlanga and Carlos Saura. My dear lady, The cabin, theatrical success Equus and some of his remembered advertising campaigns. 

Finally, the exhibition revealed to us his personal side, voluntarily hidden behind his public persona.  

Commissar: happy head

Despite being dedicated to the photography generated by the Movida —and, therefore, focused on its protagonists—, this exhibition wanted to go further and sought to also collect the work of other Madrid photographers who temporarily coexisted with this social and artistic phenomenon, but who had no connection with it for generational reasons or, simply, reasons of focus and themes.

Furthermore, the proliferation of a new press completely changed the balance of power between the media and, since these alternative newspapers opted for more visual options, they published many of the images captured by these photographers who acted as chroniclers of the Movida.

The exhibition was complemented by a wide selection of these publications to make explicit the importance of paper – and, incidentally, of analogue work – and to show the treasures without which the world we know would not have been possible, magazines and fanzines that are linked in time to the street posters of the time, also represented in this exhibition by the notable photographic presence in these posters that returned to find their place in our memory.

Commissar: Paul Sycet

Françoise Gilot, Marie Laurencin and Sonia Delaunay faced numerous obstacles in their artistic careers because they were women. Despite being praised by the great creators and intellectuals of her time and receiving public recognition (Delaunay was the first living woman to exhibit her works at the Louvre Museum), her figures were eclipsed by those of her partners: Apollinaire in the case of Marie Laurencin, Picasso in the case of Françoise Gilot (still alive and centenary, when in 2023 the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso's death is commemorated) and Robert Delaunay in the case of Sarah Ilínichna Stern (better known as Sonia Delaunay).

not just muses The exhibition offered visitors the creative and vital narrative of these extraordinary artists, as well as an adequate understanding of their works. In addition, part of the exhibition devoted itself to divulging Marie Laurencin and Sonia Delaunay's important relationship with Madrid. Thus, during their exile in the capital of Spain, both frequented Ramón Gómez de la Serna's gathering at the Café Pombo. Marie Laurencin would always carry with her her admiration for Goya, whose influence is evident in the work shown in this exhibition project. For her part, Sonia Delaunay signed up as a copyist at the Prado Museum as soon as she arrived in Madrid in 1914 and opened Casa Sonia in the city, a business dedicated to interior decoration and fashion design.

Curatorship: Helena Alonso

This exhibition brought together 45 original engravings from the series Pablo Picasso, linocuts Printed in 1962.

Throughout his long career, Picasso never stopped experimenting and innovating through different artistic media, and in the 1951s, linocut became one of his favorite techniques. After meeting the young printer Hidalgo Arnéra during his stay in Vallauris, the two began to collaborate in 1954 to make the posters for the annual Nérolium ceramic exhibition. Between 1968 and XNUMX they managed to create around two hundred linocuts together.

The first work in this series is from 1958. It is a portrait of a lady based on a painting by Cranach the Younger. This piece —the only one that will respect the traditional technique— consists of six linoleum plates, each one engraved by the six colors that the printer throws successively on the same sheet of paper.

Linocut is a variant of woodcut (xylography) in which a linoleum base is used to create the relief graphics. The first step consists of generating the image on the linoleum and vice versa with a pencil, to later eliminate the areas of counter-graphics with sharp materials, gouges, chisels... Once the image has been generated, the graphics is inked and the paper is placed on top to create the copy with the help of a press.

Curator: Marisa oropesa