The particular creative universe of Garrotxa artist Anna Manel·la takes over the Museu de la Garrotxa from today. If I could open this afternoon. Anna Manel·la (1950-2019), an exhibition in the Sala Oberta and Sala Oberta 2 that can be seen until January 15 of next year and which recovers works of all kinds by Anna Manel·la, many of which he had never been seen together.
Anna Manel·la was a multidisciplinary artist who gave shape to an artistic universe that is deeply subjective, personal and very recognizable, but with a great ability to communicate and connect with the public on a visual, mental and emotional level. His sculptures, which represent stylized figures, often creatures, convey a sense of sadness and melancholy.
From the beginning of his career, at the end of the seventies, his work unfolded while maintaining a great internal thematic and aesthetic coherence, and continuously transforming in search of the most refined forms of expression of the motives that they were their own
In this exhibition, his work is not presented from a historical and chronological discourse, but highlighting this inner unity and the perseverance of the Garrotxina artist in the repeated treatment of a series of elements and forms.
The aim of this exhibition is to show Anna Manel·la’s artistic personality as a whole, valuing the ability of her work to establish and maintain a center around which her poetics unfolds.
“You can see together works that were never exhibited folded and that even belong to distant temporal moments, and this makes possible a dialogue that had not occurred until now”, they point out from Olot Cultura.
Manel·la’s first solo exhibition was in 1981. His artistic practice focused on painting until approximately 1993, and on sculpture from that time, never leaving aside drawing and work on paper, and making inroads into other media such as printmaking, the artist’s book and installation.
His artistic personality was valued from the beginning for his individuality, even more so in an artistic context strongly marked by the weight of what is known as the School of Olot, and he enjoyed wide critical and public recognition; although his work is still little known outside the Girona regions.
if i could Anna Manel·la (1950-2019) takes the title of one of her most emblematic paintings, and at the same time refers to her work as an artist, understood as an endless search to achieve perfection which, despite being unattainable , he never stopped looking.
In order to go ahead with the exhibition, an intensive search of months has been carried out to collect Anna Manel·la’s work and more than 350 pieces have been identified, which has allowed us to have a vision most complete of his work. These are works in all the formats he worked on: painting, drawing, engraving, mixed media pieces (collages, boxes, artist’s books,…), sculptures, public sculpture and installations and ephemeral works.
This retrospective curated by art historian Lluïsa Faxedas comes three years after Manel·la’s death and coincides with the Festes del Tura. The exhibition is accompanied by several parallel activities, such as the Trepig installation, which from September 26 to October 30 will evoke an installation the artist made at the Olot Fair in 1993; two guided tours by the curator (October 1 and November 12) and a family show. It is Without the Moon, a proposal by the company Samfaina de Colors inspired by the universe of Manel·la that can be seen on December 4 at the Teatre Principal.