The most Picassian work of Pere Pruna stands out among the set of works in tender next March 15
Around the figure of Picasso, a large number of Spanish artists gathered in Paris, whose beginnings are closely linked to the genius from Malaga. One of the most notable cases is that of Pere Pruna, whose success and recognition will forever be linked to the personal and professional bond with his friend and mentor Pablo Picasso.
The watercolor made in 1965, up for auction next March 8, brings us closer to the irresistible magnetism of the Miró universe
Recognized as one of the great universal geniuses of contemporary art, Joan Miró was above all an artist committed to his time and to his particular vision of the creative act, whose essence remained unchanged. The radically introspective character of the artist and his reticence before any artistic dogma, placed a young Miró in no man’s land who, far from bowing down to the attacks he received and giving in to any passing fad, remained firm in his conviction that achieve a universal art that with its own voice would express that substantial and eternal that starts from the depths of our roots .
In an exercise in transgression, Miró rejected the classical idea of painting, which, as he used to say, had been in decline since the Altamira cave, in order to recover that original and essential underlying prehistoric art. Although it is true that his work stems from multiple influences such as Romanesque art, Dadaism or Cubism, for Miró the beauty he found in the small treasures he collected from his walks through the fields and beaches was infinitely more inspiring, where elements a priori as insignificant as a stone, a handful of sand or an ant that took him back to the origins of that Mediterranean land he longed for so much.
From this breeding ground was born an immense creator of poetic spaces and visual whims in which, as in this case, each element, sign, shape and color, sustained under the emptiness of the support, achieve a surprising and magical harmony. Experimenting and playing with all kinds of supports and techniques, paper was for him one of the mediums in which he felt most comfortable and where his need to find a plastic language that translates the pure and genuine that tangible reality hides . In this sense, the watercolor in question is a more than eloquent example of the function that Miró attributed to art, understood as a means through which to transcend reality, to ascend towards a superior spiritual world.
Under this concept, the staircase, will be a recurring motif throughout its entire trajectory, which, as in this case, will symbolize a link between the earth and the sky, a bridge between the earthly and the supernatural that embodies the desire and the need to escape. However, Miró knew how to transform all that anguish into an oneiric world, where his characteristic archaic symbols and the use of shapes and primary colors give us back that ingenuity and spontaneity of our childhood. With minimal resources, Miró managed to achieve an expressive intensity where, behind the apparent simplicity, hides the essence of an artist who sought in art the lost purity of a torn world.
On a certain occasion, Miró said that the words that poets invent are doors to a new world. Something similar happens with his work. Thanks to Miró we learned a new way of observing and being in the world that has transcended time like an immense oasis to which we go in search of a place to take refuge.
Setdart offers us these days the possibility of contemplating this starry vault thanks to this important and extensive Spanish collection forged between 1970 and the 1990s. through her we can take a tour of one of the most splendid chapters in the history of glass art; focusing on that glassware that explored the expressive possibilities of Art Nouveau and Art Deco in the leading geographical enclaves in its development such as France (Nancy), the Czech Republic (Bohemia), Italy (Murano) or Sweden (Orrefors)
For the occasion we have gathered more than two hundred pieces (vases, centerpieces, decanters, paperweights, lamp stands, ashtrays, small sculptures…) signed by the most renowned glass manufacturers. Its exquisite workmanship and avant-garde concept is in keeping with the time in which they were made.
A decisive creator in the configuration of the Spanish avant-garde, Eduardo Úrculo reached the summit of the so-called new figuration, thanks to pop art, a style in which his work manifested itself with a more daring and personal language.
After some beginnings dominated by the social expressionism of denunciation, Úrculo suffered a creative crisis that led him in 1966 to settle in the mecca of the hippy movement that at that time was Ibiza, an island where he undertook a new personal and creative stage that would mark a point of inflection and rupture with his previous work. A year later, during a trip to Stockholm, he discovered what he had been looking for so hard. The anthological exhibition where he could see the works of Warhol, Linchestein and Rauschenberg meant the beginning of his idyll with the postulates of pop art, revealing through him a neofiguration in which he could channel his most vital, playful, and ironic facet.
The watercolor made in 1965, up for auction next March 8, brings us closer to the irresistible magnetism of the Miró universe. Recognized as one of the great universal geniuses of contemporary art, Joan Miró was above all an artist committed to his time and to his particular vision of the creative act, whose essence remained unchanged. The radically introspective character of the artist and his reticence before any artistic dogma, placed a young Miró in no man’s land who, far from bowing down to the attacks he received and giving in to any passing fad, remained firm in his conviction that achieve a universal art that with its own voice would express that substantial and eternal that starts from the depths of our roots .
The Mannerist style, which emerged in Italy around the 1530s, represented a paradigm shift with respect to the Renaissance where the proportion, balance and harmony traits that until then had defined artistic creation lost their total hegemony by virtue of artistic intentionality. and expressiveness. Once the knowledge of human anatomy, perspective and color was consolidated, the artists and their workshops advanced on their path towards experimentation, thereby seeking greater drama and distinction in their compositions that would emerge in the Baroque period.
The most committed and ironic aspect of Equipo Crónica is up for auction next February 15. His intense career had a real impact on a Spanish artistic scene that at the beginning of the 60s and despite the irruption of Informalism in the previous decade, still remained under the yoke of the regime’s interests.
The Neapolitan and Roman countryside, as well as daily activities in beautiful towns in southern Italy, and also in its capital, inspired some of the best works of Ramón Tusquets.
Vanitas vanitatis are two terms related to a passage from Ecclesiastes: “Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas” (“Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity”), which tries to convey the uselessness of worldly pleasures in the face of the certainty of death and the absurd attempt of man to resemble God, forgetting that he is a mortal and finite being. Vanitas is a Latin term that we can translate as vanity, in the sense of insignificance.
