Olotí art in the post-war period and the bestiary of Gerard Mas, at the Museu de la Garrotxa

2023-09-01 17:11:13

Olotí art in the post-war period and the particular bestiary of the Guixolen sculptor Gerard Mas focus on the new exhibitions at the Museu de la Garrotxa, which open tomorrow to coincide with the Tura festivities.

Out of the frame: art in Olot during the recovery (1943 – 1968) explores the life and career of local artists who, between the 1940s and 1960s, tried to break out of the pictorial framework traditionally established in Olot in a post-war context.

During the 20th century, Olot experienced a completely unusual relationship with the plastic arts, with a legion of technically brilliant artists who laid the foundations of the local pictorial tradition. Out of frame intended to talk about those artists who, on the contrary, in the midst of the post-war period, left the established margins and exposed their circumstances and difficulties in order to become professional and make a place for themselves with the rest of their fellow immobilist artists and with a small public averse to new formal languages.

And it is that in 1930, the landscape of Olot as a pictorial motif was already fully codified from the inheritance of the Vayreda brothers, Josep Berga and their students, foreign admirers such as Santiago Rusiñol or Joaquim Mir, together with thousands of printed postcards. And this code was reinforced when the winning side of the Civil War set this local landscape tradition and the classicist sculpture of Josep Clarà as a reference.

Despite everything, in the 1940s there were artists who decided to leave this framework: artists of another generation, with other interests and marked by the post-war they eschew nineteenth-century serenity and picturesque landscapes. Outside the frame, the artists had a vast world full of possibilities, they introduced new subjects – unhappiness was explored and a less placid art emerged – and they discovered new styles, entering fully into abstraction and abandoning the formal languageswhile touching currents such as post-impressionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism or geometric abstraction.

Curated by Miquel Àngel Codes, in addition to those from the Garrotxa Museum, it allows you to see works from the Girona Art Museum, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Empordà Museum, the Fita Foundation, as well as the artist Quim Domene and a number of private collectors.

Gerard Mas, with one of his works. City Hall of Olot

The animality of Gerard Mas

In the other hand, the sculptor Gerard Mas (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1976) is this year’s guest artist. He presents at the Museu de la Garrotxa his personal bestiary, a proposal far removed from the moral intention of medieval bestiaries.

The exhibition bestiary aims to highlight our animality as humans and place ourselves in a much more modest placeand surely more awkward, as a species in the animal kingdom.

The exhibition addresses how we have historically related to animals: turning them into gods, exploiting them as a resource or integrating them into our homes as pets. All this, based on the artist’s personal style, which he usually resorts to irony, anachronisms, breaking stereotypes and decontextualization.

In this show, Mas overturns the usual codes of reading and often chooses animals that had not been practically represented in the history of art. In his work we find from pigs, sheep, chickens, dogs, cats, rats and mice, even cockroaches.

Both exhibitions will be inaugurated this Saturday at 12 and can be visited until January 14. In relation to the two exhibitions, complementary activities have been scheduled such as guided tours and the day Shoe in the museum. Everything you always wanted to know about Catalan art from the 50s and 60s.