Dalí’s Christ, one of the most important works currently in Scotland and which will finally arrive in Figueres in the autumn, and the start of a great project by the Girona Art Museum on discovery processes, destruction and recovery of the Costa Brava from the artistic world will undoubtedly be two of the main exhibitions that can be seen in the Girona regions during 2023. The Girona museums face this year with all kinds of projects on the agenda, from vindication of artists such as Pep Admetlla or Claudi Casanovas then, at the Vila Casas Foundation, an extensive inventory to document the long list of creators working in the Empordà.
The arrival at the Dalí Theater-Museum of Figueres of the Christ of Sant Joan de la Creu by Salvador Dalí, an emblematic oil on canvas owned by the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, was scheduled for November 2020, but obviously, the pandemic turned everything upside down. Three years later, the Salvador Gala Dalí Foundation resumes the project and, in addition to exhibiting the Christ, the Dalinian Studies Center in collaboration with the museum’s Conservation and Restoration department will carry out an important work of research on the work and will reflect on its significance in the field of contemporary art.
Ambitious is also the project that the Girona Art Museum has in hand, which in April will present the first of a trilogy of exhibitions on the Costa Brava as an artistic paradise. For three consecutive years and with the involvement of other museums, it will approach the artists and artistic movements that have made the Girona coast their home during the 20th century.
The first exhibition, entitled Costa Brava, the discovery of paradise. 1870-1936 will be dedicated to the process of discovery from the end of the 19th century with the first landscapers to the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s. Curated by Mariona Seguranyes, it aims to explain the plastic and visual discovery of the concept of the Costa Brava by tracing a route through the different coastal artistic hubs, such as Tossa de Mar, Sant Feliu de Guíxols or Cadaqués, interweaving paintings with correspondence, postcards or vintage photos.
With around fifty works by artists such as Lluís Rigalt, Francesc Miralles, Lluïsa Vidal, Rachel Russell, Laureà Barrau or Olga Sacharroff, it wants to make a journey from the discovery of the landscape to the paradise that welcomed the first vanguards
The Girona exhibition will also have an extension at the Museu de l’Empordà in Figueres, where the core of Cadaqués will be addressed in depth, in a monographic and simultaneous exhibition under the title of Costa Brava: when Cadaqués was a party . The studio where the two samples were born, that of Girona and Figuereres, will be recognized in a single catalogue.
Also in the spring, and again with the vindication of art created from the territory, the Vila Casas Foundation will open in Can Mario de Palafrugell the exhibition Mar de fons, the continuation of an artistic cartography of the Empordà begun in beginning of 2022 with universal Localisms. Empordà artists (1).
Curated, like the first, by Toni Álvarez de Arana, Mar de Fons collects a second selection of artists resident in the Empordà, but this time with other artistic approaches, often avoiding painting or sculpture in the most formal format traditional that we know.
The most remarkable thing about these two exhibitions at Can Mario is the fact that they have served as a springboard for us to start fixing a whole series of names in a territory that sees its artistic offer grow year after year.
Admetlla and Mal Pelo in Girona
At Bòlit, the Contemporary Art Center of Girona, 2023 will be the year to claim two artistic trajectories, those of Pep Admetlla and Mal Pelo, with proposals that go beyond the traditional retrospective and that will arrive in the autumn.
In The shadow under the eyelid. Anatomy lesson of the eccentric body, the artist from Girona will bring to Sant Nicolau a synthesis of years of research on human anatomy, the enigmas of the brain and vision as a mystery.
As for the more than thirty years of the Mal Pelo company’s career, they will be collected in an exhibition distributed between the headquarters of the Bòlit on the Rambla and the Pou Rodó and named The Bluebird Call, like the piece with which Pep Ramis and María Muñoz will return to the dance duet and of which they offered a first taste in the last one High season.
Other interesting proposals at the Bòlit for the year we are about to start will be a collective exhibition based on the research on identity and gender by the pioneer Hélène Cixous or More room for the dark, on the imaginary of Victor Català
A Olotanger and Casanovas
As for the Museums of Olot, they will also look at local creation, but with very different proposals: on the one hand, the works of the Olot artist Claudi Casanovas will occupy the Open Room and the courtyard of the Hospice; on the other hand, the photographer Martí Albesa will show the reality in Almeria’s sea of plastic, where hundreds of migrants live wretchedly and, in addition, an exhibition will invite the discovery of master carpenter Joan Llor, who worked during the second half of the 18th century in Olot and created a decorative technique for furniture.
In dialogue with contemporary works of art from the Vila Casas Foundation, in addition, the Museu dels Sants d’Olot will host the second part of Sincronies, the project dedicated to capital sins, which this time will focus on anger.