Pablo Palazuelo
dal 13/3/2007 al 2/6/2007
Segnalato da
13/3/2007
Pablo Palazuelo
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Work Process. The retrospective presents a broad selection of drawings, gouaches, paintings, and sculptures. The academic-influenced hierarchization of media and supports that gives priority to painting or sculpture as the finished work has perhaps put too much emphasis on his paintings and on the autonomy of the media used. But the actual performative act, the artistic exploration, is also a very important part of his production.
Work Process
Curators: Manuel J. Borja-Villel and Teresa Grandas
Although Pablo Palazuelo (1915) is a key figure in Spanish art of the second half of the 20th century, he has yet to enjoy the kind of international position his work deserves. The reasons for this neglect lie in an overly linear concept of abstraction, as being something that begins with Cézanne and Picasso, continues with Constructivism, and reaches forward to Minimalism. Such orthodox conception of modern art has crowded out other practices and aesthetics more engaged with a symbolic vision. Palazuelo is one of the artists in this situation. Art history of the last thirty years has cornered Palazuelo in a kind of idealistic abstraction very much linked to certain spiritual movements. While it is true the artist feeds off currents of thought associated with the esoteric, the Cabbala and non-Western cognitive philosophies and processes, it is no less true that mathematics, physics, and scientific thought are also essential to hiswork. The development of abstraction and the use of geometry in his oeuvre are intimately linked to a rational, performative process based on the discovery, rather than on the invention, of new forms.
Palazuelo’s career is anything but linear; forms appear and disappear, and then, as time passes, return to the fore, albeit in different ways. The academic-influenced hierarchization of media and supports that gives priority to painting or sculpture as the finished work has perhaps put too much emphasis on his paintings and on the autonomy of the media used. But the actual performative act, the artistic exploration, is also a very important part of Palazuelo’s production. Drawing’s central place in his oeuvre invites us to reconsider his work less as object and more as process. The concerns and works of Pablo Palazuelo are so closely linked that it is worth underlining two particularly important periods in his life: his twenty-year-plus sojourn in Paris and his eventual return to Spain. Settling in Paris in the late 1940s, and establishing a link very early on with the Maeght gallery, proved a decisive influence on the projection of his work. A few years after initiating his painting career, Pablo Palazuelo’s works had already been included in international exhibitions, both of contemporary Spanish art and in theme-based shows approaching abstraction from a number of different perspectives. His work also found its way early on into private collections, as well as European and American museums. However, his work was largely neglected in Spain until his return to his native country in the late sixties, precisely when his international renown began to fade, thereby denying him the place he deserved in the annals of world art in the second half of the 20th century. Beyond the mere anecdote of the acknowledgement received, the influence of these changes in his work is fully noticeable. The restless lines, the constant manipulation of drawing and painting visible in the early stages of his career, are more remote and refined in later years, with process and gesture becoming increasingly detached from the definitive state of the work.
Organized by the MACBA in a co-production with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, this retrospective exhibition will focus on the lesser-known aspects of Palazuelo’s artistic production, including works not previously seen in public, together with a broad selection of drawings, gouaches, paintings, and sculptures.
Guggenheim Museum
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 - Bilbao