Andorra: culture and art from the exhibition space in the Central Park

The Central Park, an artistic meeting place, can be glimpsed as a great reference point for culture in the country with the inauguration of the new Andorra la Vella Art Center and its transfer to the government. With a broad, multifaceted and eclectic museum program, this new room will become the epicenter of Andorra's artistic life.

Andorra continues to bet on culture and the culture of the country. This is how the new exhibition space was born a few months ago in the Central Park of Andorra la Vella, a meeting place that the country demanded to serve cultural activity, hoping that it will become the epicenter of Andorran artistic life with the different exhibitions that will be programmed there.

This new space, with a powerful exhibition program, consists of around 400 square meters and a single open, contemporary and current space, which can be expanded by another 140 square meters to cover possible needs that may arise from the exhibition. The government hall of Andorra is a cultural, educational, social and recreational space dedicated to spreading art, especially from contemporary art to the present, also giving rise to the emerging art of young artists, both national and international, and with the intention of it being a meeting place and also a learning space for everyone who goes to visit it.

With a broad, multifaceted and eclectic museum panorama, this new room will become the epicenter of artistic life, with three exhibitions scheduled during the year 2022, starting with the show of Andorra la Vella artist Judit Gasset, curated by Carme Soler, where the visitor could have a broader view of Gasset's artistic evolution. The next one is Abecedari solidari , an exhibition tour as a tribute to Miquel Martí i Pol, to reach the last one of this year, scheduled for the final months, where you could visit From optical art to planetary folklore , from the Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely.

Abecedari solidari , curated by Gabriel Serrano, was a tribute to the key figure of Miquel Martí i Pol from a collective exhibition that brings together twenty-six artists and writers, each of whom has created a work from of the subjective, artistic and personal interpretation of a letter and a word of the assigned haiku. Authors such as Eduard Arranz-Bravo, Riera i Aragó, Joan Fontcuberta or Robert Llimós, as plastic artists, in addition to for example Francesc Parcerisas, Dolors Miquel or Vinyet Panyella, as writers, among others, make a panorama of Martí and Pol from his creations. We also wanted to show the relationship of the writer from Roda de Ter with Andorra, since he himself considered it his second homeland. An exhibition that will have a two-year itinerancy through different spaces in Spain and France.

The artistic exhibition year ended at the Art Center with the monograph on Victor Vasarely, one of the great artists of the 20th century and creator of the optical art movement (Op Art). An artistic tour that was left pending at the time of the closing of the Artalroc room, since it was an exhibition planned for the end of 2020, but the health context, the lack of a space and the traveling forced to postpone this sample until the end of this year. Curated by Henry Périer and in collaboration with the City Council of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, it showed the different stages, phases and moments of the artist from Pécs, Hungary. Already at the beginning, Vasarely began to use geometric elements to cause optical effects, went through kinetic art and arrived with all its force and splendor in Op Art.

So this new space started with a show by a national artist and ended with a key international artist within the art history of the last century. An important element for this space and for Andorra.

Andorra and its support for creation

Andorra will also expand support for creation with the continuation of the Faber residency. A total of ten artists will pass through the residence, located in La Massana, bringing together creators and professionals from various fields. Thus, there have been and will be Catalan creators, from the United Kingdom, the United States, Peru, Poland, Australia and Canada. In La Massana it was also seen how the Art Workshops have been resumed this 2022, with the aim of contributing to the aid to creation, anticipating awarding between one and three workshops during the year.

Andorra Land Art - one of the great events of this artistic current, which emerged in the middle of the 20th century -, was organized between July and September 2021, with the fourth biennial, with a total of forty-eight works and facilities linked to the natural space provided by Andorra. Twelve weeks to walk between art and nature. Regarding this event, Thoreau commented: "We want that, through multiple artistic proposals, the people who move to the different points of the exhibition can join this multifaceted reflection on the extent of the changes that the pandemic has brought about for the world population.”

A cultural context that suffered a lot for a while but has returned to a moment of normality. This can be seen in the different towns of Andorra, with this network of activities, museums and art galleries that make this country a place to give visibility to art, to recognize the country's art and to support it to emerging creators.