15/12/2020
The fifth exhibition at the Andorran museum offers a dialogue between two collections.
At a press conference, the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Andorra and Creand presented the Museum’s new exhibition, “Talented Painters from Rigalt to Puigdengolas”. This exhibition focuses on the artistic dialogue between the Art Collection of Creand and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. It will be inaugurated on 11 February 2021 and the exhibition will remain open until 9 January 2022. It will open to the public from 12 February.
The exhibition will show the work of Catalan artists from the late 19th century and the early 20th century; painters who coincided in their training or who created their own school. The artistic schools of La Llotja, Olot, La Colla del Safrà, the Sitges Luminists and Els Quatre Gats will be represented in a selection of works intended to illustrate the similarities and differences between Catalan painters of this period, the most unique styles and the commonalities in their work.
Pep Farràs, manager of the Fundació Museand, said that “the exhibition is born of the commitment to culture and the union between the public and private sectors, with the desire to disseminate and preserve our culture, our country’s art. For the Thyssen Museum, this exhibition is the best example that defines the Andorran facility as a meeting point between tradition and modernity, creating synergies between public and private initiative, and striving to make the country’s art available to all and for all.”
Joan R. Mas, director of Corporate Communications, Marketing and Client Digital Transformation at Creand, is grateful for the opportunity offered by the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Andorra, a gold standard in our country’s cultural offering and that contributes to the international profile of the Principality. He said that “the exhibition is a great opportunity to introduce the Principality’s residents and visitors to an important selection from the Art Collection of Creand, pieces which are being shown for the first time in Andorra in a museum space open to the public. The exhibition allows us to involve visitors in our commitments as a Bank to promote, disseminate and share knowledge and culture.”
The fifth exhibition was conceived by the two curators, Isabel Rodríguez and Guillermo Cervera, with a view to collaboration between the private collection of Creand, which was started in 1989, and the Andorran museum, created from the private collection of Baroness Carmen Thyssen. Guillermo Cervera, co-curator, explained the most significant artistic aspects of the new exhibition, focusing on pictorial dialogue through a selection of paintings by Catalan artists in the two collections. Ramon Casas i Carbó, Modest Urgell i Inglada, Joan Roig y Soler, Joaquim Mir i Trinxet and Eliseu Meifrèn i Roig, among others, are the stars of the exhibition.
Cervera explained that “among the paintings selected, we will discover the work of artists specialised in different types of landscape, portraits and other multifaceted artists who capture their expertise on the canvas. Among the landscape artists, some found their source of inspiration in their own land, while others sought distant places within the peninsula, islands and even outside the continent. Many of the Catalan artists represented in this exhibition were fortunate to be able to explore new trends outside of Catalonia, although they did not stop painting inspirational rural places when they returned home.”
The two curators, Rodríguez and Cervera, selected the work Prats de Santa Coloma, Andorra by Joaquim Mir i Trinxet as the central image of the exhibition. The artist created several pictorial testimonies of his visits to the valleys in the 1930s, a clear indication of the importance of the Principality of Andorra as artistic inspiration.
To illustrate the dialogue between the two collections, which will consist of 23 works from the Art Collection of Creand and 5 pieces from the Carmen Thyssen Collection, Cervera cited two works by the artist Joan Roig y Soler, cofounder of the Luminist school of Sitges. “In Cases a la Platja from the Art Collection of Creand, the artist perfectly captures the light effects of a beach landscape, a space occupying a very significant part of the piece, taking prominence in the foreground, a structure characteristic of marine art. Platja de Vilanova from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, depicts the beach at Vilanova i la Geltrú with houses on the sand and the sea in the background, a very similar scene that follows the same structure as Cases a la Platja, but inverted”.