The exhibition ‘Drawing modernity. From Fortuny to Tàpies’ opens its doors at the Mirador del Carmen with a hundred works of the most outstanding universal geniuses of art.

The exhibition, which can be visited until February 23, is organized by the Estepona City Council and Fundación MAPFRE. It brings together drawings by artists such as Picasso, Miró, Klimt, Degas, Sorolla and Rodin.
This weekend the visit will be free for the public.

Estepona City Council and Fundación MAPFRE have inaugurated the exhibition ‘Drawing Modernity. From Fortuny to Tàpies. Fundación MAPFRE Collections’, which can be visited until February 23 at the Mirador del Carmen Cultural Center. The exhibition shows a hundred drawings from the period between 1864 and 1968, created by undisputed figures of the history of art, which for the first time hang on the walls of the exhibition space. Among those masters are names like Pablo Picasso, Joaquin Sorolla, Auguste Rodin, Egon Schiele, Mariano Fortuny, Rafael Alberti, Eduardo Chillida or Antoni Tàpies.

The mayor of Estepona, José María García Urbano, thanked Fundación MAPFRE for its collaboration to make this new exhibition “of special relevance for the quality of his works, showing the public the creations of some of the greatest universal geniuses of art”. In this sense, he stressed the “cultural milestone” in the city that represents this exhibition, which offers a perspective of drawing as an artistic discipline.

With this exhibition, said García Urbano, the Mirador del Carmen “is consolidated as an exhibition space of national reference”, and has advanced that, in a short time, this cultural facility will house a new library, which will occupy seven floors of the tower, “the perfect complement to the exhibition space and the Conservatory of Music, which already houses”.

Nadia Arroyo, director of the Culture Area of Fundación MAPFRE, said: “For us it is a great satisfaction to be able to contribute to the dissemination and enjoyment of culture at the Mirador del Carmen in Estepona with this exhibition ‘Drawing modernity. From Fortuny to Tàpies. Fundación MAPFRE Collections’, a corpus of works on paper that allows us to travel through the birth of modern art in our country.”

The exhibition is presented as a semblance of the history of art of much of the twentieth century on paper. Structured in three creative stages, it begins with drawings by Spanish artists such as Mariano Fortuny, Joaquín Sorolla and Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz, “still linked to tradition, but with features that make us think of the beginning of the century that was about to arrive. Many of them were cosmopolitan artists, worked outside our borders and knew the works of masters such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Egon Schiele, or Gustav Klimt, also present in the exhibition.

Significant is the presence of Pablo Picasso’s creations during his time in Paris, where he developed most of his career and whose work served as a link between the most innovative trends that developed in the French capital and the art that was produced in Spain.

Drawings by Joaquim Sunyer, Enric Casanovas, Joaquín Torres García or Francis Picabia dialogue with each other throughout the exhibition, to tell us about a change of era and a heterogeneous art that includes aspects of the avant-garde movements through the aforementioned Picasso, but also Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko or Sonia Delaunay, among others.

The privileged presence of many Spanish artists in Paris allowed them to witness firsthand the gestation of surrealism, a trend to which, because of its importance, this exhibition devotes special attention. Some of the painters in the exhibition were active members of the group and essential figures of the movement. Such is the case of Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Luis Fernández and Óscar Domínguez. The relations between France and Spain resulted in a strong surrealist imprint in our country, which would extend over time and would walk along with other currents until the decade of the fifties of the last century.

After the Civil War, the avant-garde impulse in Spain, although not forgotten, suffered a break. A certain type of costumbrist and melancholic art appears, related to the German realism of the 1920s, which has its best expression in the watercolors of Arturo Souto, which can be seen first hand in this exhibition.

The echo of the new European realisms in Genaro Lahuerta and Joaquín Peinado, the surrealist influence of Julio González in the 1940s, the search for the primitive and the pure forms of Ángel Ferrant, link up with other informalist works, some more gestural, others more material, of which the two drawings that close the exhibition, by Tápies and Chillida respectively, are an excellent example.

The holdings of this exhibition, which are part of Fundación MAPFRE’s valuable collection of drawings, offer a unique opportunity to admire works of art on paper by the most outstanding artists, through a story that aims to show the paths that led to modernity in the change from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

The visit to the exhibition will be free for all the public (registered and non-registered) during this first opening weekend.