"Maternasis, New additions to the collection of Postwar and Second Avant-garde Art"

The exhibition Maternasis, New additions to the collection of Post-War and Second Avant-garde Art, which can be visited at the MNAC from April 28 to September 26, is named after the iconic book by the artist Núria Pompeia, published in 1967, it allows you to discover amazing creators, some until recently forgotten, such as Mari Chordà, Roser Bru, Parvine Curie and Núria Pompeia herself.

Among the works of these creators recently added to the collection are those that deal with issues that women have often been dispossessed of. One of these issues, paradoxically, is pregnancy, a key stage of motherhood, which concerns women intimately and has a mysterious and profound yet social dimension. This subject is exceptional in an iconographic corpus that has been dominated by men.

Roser Bru, Dona amb les seves parts

In the works of Chordà, Bru or Curie, pregnancy manifests this physical and vital dimension that leads to an intimate meditation that is difficult to share, but that art, led by these artists, comes to suggest. Núria Pompeia's feminist perspective, which describes the pregnancy process with irony and objectivity, points to the loneliness of women and acquires a social and political dimension.

The set we now present, which includes all the originals that were part of the book and some studies, allows us to address the multiple dimensions of an experience that is both everyday and transcendent. These works of contemporary art are accompanied by the Virgin of Good Hope, from the Circle of Osona, first quarter of the 16th century, which shows a similar iconography. This exhibition is a further step in the construction of the collection of Post-War and Second Avant-garde Art, helping to complete its historical narrative and respond to the patrimonial need of Catalan art of this period.

In parallel to the exhibition, the museum carries out a series of activities on the artists represented and on the issue of motherhood by renowned specialists in the history of art and feminism, with the aim of to establish an open debate inscribed in the social concerns of our time.