In the exhibition Venezia 1958 the Galeria Mayoral in Barcelona commemorates the Spanish Pavilion at the 1958 Venice Biennale of Art, an episode that became a turning point in the international recognition of postwar Spanish art. The show, which will be on view from 26 September to 4 December, reunites, more than sixty years after the event, ten of the artworks included in that exhibition by the artists Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida, Rafael Canogar, Manolo Millares, Antonio Saura and Manuel Rivera, all of them proceeding from important Spanish and international collections. This project is the main exhibition in the celebration of the gallery’s 30th anniversary.

The exhibition exclusively re-examines, for the first time, an episode that was crucial to the history of Spanish art of the second half of the 20th century and constituted a breakthrough for both the dissemination of Spanish Informalist art and the artists themselves who took part. As well as recouping and exhibiting some of the artworks that were shown in Venice in 1958, the aim of the project is to analyse the relevance and the consequences of the event, which took place at a time when the Franco regime was particularly interested in presenting a modern image to the outside world.

The Venezia 1958 exhibition has reunited ten artworks that are highly representative of the Biennale show. On display by Antoni Tàpies are two purely materic works dating from 1958, Brown and Ochre Painting and Blackish Brown; by Millares, three of his burlap paintings; by Chillida, a relief and a bronze sculpture, Trembling Irons III; an abstraction by Canogar from 1957; a composition on canvas with metal mesh by Manuel Rivera from 1957; and the 1957 painting Salvatierra by Antonio Saura, from the Damas (Ladies) series.

Venezia 1958

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