Curator: Tomàs Llorens, art historian

Torres-García at his Crossroads will gather more than 80 works, mainly drawings, many of them unpublished, from the collection of Alejandra, Aurelio and Claudio Torres, as well as paintings and wooden constructions. The exhibition will take a look at the essential features of Joaquim Torres-García's career as an artist, spanning approximately the first half of the 20th century.

Joaquim Torres-García (Montevideo, 1874-1949) trained in Barcelona during the Modernista period. He was a key figure in the Noucentista movement until his departure from Catalonia in 1920, when he started on a path that was to make him one of the pioneers of geometric abstraction along with artists like Mondrian, Van Doesburg and Hélion.

The aim of this exhibition is to give the visitor a close-up of this artist's creative procedure and show the crossroads he faced during his career: the classical turn in Modernisme and the years in Paris and New York. The exhibition looks at the myths and the recurrent subject matter in Torres-García's work, at the same time as it explores the contrast and synthesis, or deep equivalence, between 'classical beauty' and 'modern beauty'.

Curators: Cristina Mendoza, Assistant Director of Collections at the MNAC; Mercè Doñate, Head of the Modern Art Collection at the MNAC; Francesc Quílez, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the MNAC and Elena Llorens, Conservation Assistant of the Modern Art Collection at the MNAC

The French Painter Gustave Courbet rocked the art world in the 19th century. Through his brush, reality entered painting: Realism was born.

With the aim of tracing his footsteps in this country, the MNAC is exhibiting a selection of his most outstanding works, most of which are being shown in Spain for the first time. The exhibition reveals Courbet’s influence on Catalan painting in the period, most of all through the work of Ramon Martí Alsina, the man responsible for the renewal of painting and who introduced Realism to the Spanish art scene.

It is an ambitious exhibition, produced by the MNAC, that invites the public to gain greater in-depth knowledge of Realism and at the same time discover its precedents and its legacy, in a show that deliberately goes beyond the temporal limits of this movement:
from the Spanish Golden Age, with paintings by Murillo, Ribera and Velázquez, to contemporary art, through the work of Antoni Tàpies, one of the most universal Catalan artists.

If you show your exhibition or general Museum admission ticket you can benefit from a 5% discount on the exhibition catalogue at the MNAC shop (offer valid until 10 July 2011).

With the collaboration: