The National Museum and the Tecla Sala Art Center are working on a retrospective exhibition on Ferran Garcia Sevilla

The artist Ferran Garcia Sevilla donates to the National Museum an important set of works from his conceptual period, which will be shown in rooms 81 bis and 52. The set of works donated is of great historical importance, not only because regarding the career of Ferran Garcia Sevilla (Palma, 1949) but also within the framework of the history of contemporary Catalan art, and represents a fundamental contribution to the establishment of the national post-war art collection and second avant-garde in which the Museum continues to work. With this project, the National Museum continues to weave a network of collaborations and complicities with public and private institutions that have been and still are key in the vindication and dissemination of this period. It has been many years since there has been a major exhibition of the artist, a fact that makes this exhibition particularly relevant, which covers his entire career and reaches the most recent production, and which is presented right in the space where Garcia Sevilla himself occupied a workshop in 1988.

The donation

The set that enters the National Museum of Art of Catalonia is made up of 54 works from 1966 to 1974, made in the political context of the end of the Franco regime, which the artist denounces with virulence and subtlety at the same time. It also includes a series of works related to the Mallorcan landscape, which will be presented at the National Museum establishing a contrasting dialogue with the painting of Joaquim Mir. In addition to the donation of these 54 works, Ferran Garcia Sevilla also deposited in the Museum a series of 45 photographs taken in 1974 from images cut from the press and associated with violence, death, torture and war. Before his immersion in the painting of the eighties of the twentieth century, Ferran Garcia Sevilla was one of the most outstanding pioneers of conceptual art, with very diverse and radical proposals, using the object, poor materials and the photography, often as a performative record. In the works that form part of the National Museum's collection, you can also appreciate the artist's constant preoccupation with the contemplation of nature and the questioning of the physical laws of the cosmos. It is a rather unknown work that allows to deal with a whole series of key problems such as advances in quantum physics, the definition of art and its place in society, the psycho-sociology of the image or the denunciation of abuses of power and authority. A selection of the works that make up this donation will be exhibited at the Museum at the end of the year, as was already done with the donations of works by Aurèlia Muñoz or Benet Rossell.

Cosmos-Chaos at the Tecla Sala Art Center

In parallel, the Tecla Sala Art Center, in collaboration with the National Museum, is organizing the Ferran Garcia Sevilla exhibition. Cosmos-Chaos, which will cover the artist's entire career, especially painting, up to his most recent production. This is not a conventional retrospective. The works from different periods and languages are combined with a contrasting sequence that allows you to grasp or sense existential and moral problems that are very current. Garcia Sevilla's interests in philosophy, religion and science do not make him a merely speculative artist. On the contrary, it shows a constant and vehement concern for the political present and its conflicts. The central themes of his work are the reflection on art and creation, on the universe (an aspect that will become recurrent throughout his career, with a particular connection and combination of philosophy and physics) and natural laws and , finally, a vehement denunciation of abuses of power and reactionary forces. The collaboration between the National Museum and the Tecla Sala Art Centre, one of the main promoters and disseminators of contemporary creation in our country, has made this joint project possible. The Tecla Sala Art Center is a facility of L'Hospitalet City Council that, with the participation of the Generalitat de Catalunya, works to promote contemporary visual arts, as well as to foster relations in the territory, between citizens , the creators, the educational and professional sectors and the institutions involved, promoting, accompanying and disseminating projects at the local, metropolitan and national level. Since 2012, the Tecla Sala Art Center has been part of the eight territorial centers of the Public System of Visual Arts Equipment of Catalonia, according to a 2010 decree of the Government of Catalonia. With this project the National Museum and the Tecla Sala Art Center continue to strengthen the network of collaborations with artists and the main agents and centers of reference for the production, study and dissemination of post-war art and second vanguard in our country. This task has already allowed the National Art Museum of Catalonia to incorporate works by artists such as Benet Rossell, Aurèlia Muñoz, Mari Chordà, Guinovart, Josep Maria Subirachs, Parvine Curie, Joan Rabascall, Edwin Bechtold or Nazario , among many others.

In the image: Ferran García Sevilla, Photograph intervened, 1974, @Ferran Garcia Sevilla, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2022