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Works from the Fundació Güell collection

Works from the Fundació Güell collection: our commitment is to the outbreak is an exhibition that aims to highlight the singular qualities of this collection, reposition it and connect it with the broader context of contemporary art history.

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Presentation

Works from the Fundació Güell collection: our commitment is to the outbreak

A careful selection of works from the Fundació Güell’s contemporary art collection is being exhibited in the incomparable Palau Güell for the first time.

Considering Palau Güell’s special ties to the Güell family, the exhibition connects their past, present and future patronage activities. Its works were produced with the support of the foundation’s Visual Arts Grant and date from the 1980s to the present day. In partnership with Barcelona Provincial Council, these works are displayed at Palau Güell each year, together with the results of young researchers in the visual arts, music and architecture (as of 2023) who also received grants. Works from the Fundació Güell collection: our commitment is to the outbreak aims to highlight the singular qualities of this collection, reposition it and connect it with the broader context of contemporary art history.

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The Fundació Güell

The history of the Fundació Güell’s contemporary art collection is linked to its origins as an institution. In 1956, Juan Antonio Güell i López, the count of Güell, a businessman, politician and intellectual who had also been the mayor of Barcelona and the president of the Sant Jordi Royal Academy of Fine Arts, set up a foundation dedicated to supporting and promoting young artists from the regions of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands. This initiative furthered the patronage activities begun by his parents, Isabel López i Bru and Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi, patrons of Antoni Gaudí who commissioned him to design Palau Güell. The new Fundació Güell’s headquarters were established at the Sant Jordi Royal Academy of Fine Arts and it began to collaborate with institutions like the Reial Cercle Artístic – Institut Barcelonès d’Art, the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and the Orfeó Català.

Under the leadership of Eusebi Güell i Jover (1956-1990) and Carles Güell i de Sentmenat (1991-2012), the Foundation began partnerships with institutions devoted to promoting art and music in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian autonomous community.

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The grants

It granted subsidies to schools running applied art education projects and prizes for musical composition, musical performances and studies on art history.

It also helped to fund concerts and the adaptation of cultural spaces. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Foundation regularly began to award grants for the artistic production of sculpture, painting, engraving and drawing, which is how the current collection got its start.

Eusebi Güell i Malet has been the president of the foundation since 2013. With him at the helm, the foundation’s heritage management activities and partnerships with other institutions have taken a new turn. The foundation has strengthened its old links with Palau Güell, which had come under the control of Barcelona Provincial Council in 1945 after it was bequeathed to it by Mercè Güell. In addition to its visual arts grant and music grant, it also began to offer an architecture prize. Since 2014, Palau Güell has hosted the annual presentation of the young artists, musicians and researchers who have received a grant from the Fundació Güell.

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Section 1

The first works in the collection date from the 1980s. What we see here is the production of artists trained in the Catalan scene in the 1970s and 1980s. The heirs of the languages of the historical avant-gardes, their work here blurs the conceptual boundaries between tradition, modernity, figuration and abstraction. Technical mastery of the materials, the modelling of the human body, especially the female, and the artists’ reflection on their own visual artistic language are characteristics shared by the works exhibited here, some of them created by fine arts students whose professional careers have taken various twists and turns over time.

Alícia Alegre’s Sospir (Sigh, 1983) works on the material possibilities of bronze, emphasising the potential of corporeality and nature. The result is strong three-dimensional volumes, where we can identify a Mediterranean idiosyncrasy that we can trace in contemporary Catalan art throughout the 20th century. Alegre’s work engages in a dialogue with Jaime de Córdoba’s Banyant (Bathing, 1985) and Josep Ignasi Alegre’s Figura femenina (Female figure, 1987), both directly carved in alabaster. Along these lines, Teresa Riba’s terra cotta sculpture Bust femení (Female bust, 1988) explores the expressive possibilities of faces. Its corpulent and sensual forms testify to her mastery in rendering female anatomy, paying formal homage to model works of modern Catalan sculpture.

The sculptures produced between the 1990s and the early 2000s continue the trend of reinterpreting traditional themes by deconstructing language, displaying the artists’ technical mastery and conserving the essence of the collection acquired over the previous years. This is clearly seen in Rosa Maria Bessó Carreras’ Serena (2000) and Raquel Maneu Castells’ Figura femenina dempeus (Standing female figure, 2002). The power of the body and the female form remain favourite themes to explore in three dimensions. Three other sculptures produced from this perspective are Sense títol (Untitled, 2004) by Sofia Isus, Figura femenina (Female figure, 2006) by Miguel Pang Ly and Figura femenina (Female figure, 2008) by Alba Aragonés.

In itself, the set of sculptures raises a discussion about plasticity and working with forms, where technique and the expressive possibilities of the materials come into play.

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Section 2

Works by Eulàlia Borrut Casas usher us into the 1990s. Her three paintings Natura morta. Fruites (Still life: fruit, 1993), Noia i gos (Girl and dog, 1993) and Natura morta, pa i pastisseria (Still life: bread and pastries, 1993) were conceived as part of a Pop-influenced series dedicated to representing modern everyday life. Borrut puts a contemporary spin on traditional genres such as still lifes and genre painting – the modern woman as the subject, a girl playing with a dog and a meal of pastries and fruit are common scenarios in our collective imagination today. Gabriela Gallego explores the possibilities of contemporary landscape painting with El Cabanyal #12 (2011). It shows us the paradoxical and impossible urban geometry of blocks of flats and Modernista (Catalan Art Nouveau) homes in the working-class maritime district of Valencia, recently known for real estate speculation and gentrification that is endangering the essence of the places that Sorolla used to depict. Noi assegut (Seated boy, 2007) by Carles Bartolomé Ibars and Osetia (Ossetia, 2013) by Estela Ortiz are conceptual figurative portraits that transport us to the intimate sphere of the people depicted. Moving to drawing and illustration, Marcel Rubió conceived the images in Il·lustracions per a Ícar (Illustrations for Icarus, 2013) to accompany the poetry collection Ícar i set poems (Icarus and seven poems) by Adrià Targa.

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Section 3

The Fundació Güell's art collection started to take a conceptual turn in the 2010s. The works displayed here pave the way towards a more contemporary use of language, combining the plastic arts with audiovisual components, performance, installations and other elements. The essence of this part of the collection is interdisciplinarity and new artistic interests connected with the current cultural zeitgeist.

The result is a panoply of individual voices that come together to tell their own and others’ stories. Miquel Grima works on festive imagery and scenography. His study in sculpture Morfologia pètria (Rock morphology, 2012), carved directly from marble pebbles, explores the expressive possibilities of the grotesques through the faces of theatrical characters. Esther Pi works with sculpture, installations and performance. The materials in her works Cor fort (Strong heart, 2009) and Dues gotes d’aigua (Two waterdrops, 2010) take on a symbolic significance to demonstrate the simultaneous potential and fragility of bodies and their connection with nature. Lluc Baños presents a model of the project /_ßuk_ðó/ (2013), a sculptural installation consisting of a set of life-sized carved stone replicas of found objects permanently repositioned around his studio in La Floresta (Lleida). The passage of time and the action of nature have affected and changed the set.

Berta Blanca T. Ivanow shows her material experimentation process to create sculpture in Contemplatio (Contemplation, 2016), which later resulted in the audiovisual project Mujer vacío (Woman emptiness, 2018), where dance, sculpture and film intermingle as a visual reflection on femininity. Anna Plaza’s Sense títol (Untitled, 2013) uses drawing to explore the limits of the human figure associated with movement and dance, in this case with hands that could simulate those of a flamenco bailaora.

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Section 4

Eulàlia Rovira and Adrian Schindler take up the potential of bodies and matter as the central theme of their piece Keel/reef (2019). The corporal and architectural ornament is raised as a possible place to confront the tense relationships with alterity and the environment in a post-colonial world facing ecocide. In Dispositius per a un escenari tolit (Devices for a crippled stage, 2019), Helena Vinent reflects on the identity of bodies labelled as disabled. Expressing herself as a deaf person, she experiments with the hybridisation of bodies and technology and the possibilities of a posthuman drift.

Aldo Urbano’s Historias del arte (Histories of art, 2022) and Mirada llama (Flame perspective, 2020) give us a taste of a project that he defines as a pictorial and literary experiment.

Centred on the narrative of overflowing histories of art or painting in the imagination of creation, the result of cathartic experiences, these works are visually expressed with colours and vibrations capable of producing extreme emotional experiences.

Die blaue Blume im Land der Technik (The blue flower in the land of technology, 2023), by Albert García-Alzórriz, is an audiovisual study on the relationship between the human body and latest-generation hospital technology. The sound and visual potential helps to create a dense atmosphere of uncertainty that immerses the viewer.

Mar Reykjavik’s Principi, principi, principi (Beginning, beginning, beginning, 2023) is a film essay that explores the potential of beginnings. It is a work that never ends, in which up to seven possible beginnings, seven outbreaks, are set against the linear forms of narrative that prevail. As Rafa Guijarro writes in the text accompanying the work: ‘Mar Reykjavik proposes a specific system of communication in which a suspended plot unfolds, crossed by seven outbreaks – seven intact bodies of film – that in turn structure a single outbreak whose relevance owes solely to its own impulse to appear. These seven beginnings form an autonomous organism by which she aims to liberate the phenomenon of emergence – of outbreak – from its dependency on the rest of the elements that make up the storyline’.

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Credits

Works from the Fundació Güell collection: our commitment is to the outbreak

Organization
Direcció del Palau Güell. Àrea de Cultura. Diputació de Barcelona
Fundació Güell

Curatorship and texts
Vera Renau Alejandro

Coordination
Direcció del Palau Güell
Subdirecció d’Imatge Corporativa i Promoció Institucional. Diputació de Barcelona

Exhibition design and installation coordination
Cristina Casabona

Graphic design
Subdirecció d’Imatge Corporativa i Promoció Institucional. Diputació de Barcelona

Production and installation
Maud Gran Format, SL

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