ALFONSO ALBACETE. The Reasons of Painting

Opening: November 8, at 20:00 h.
Dates: November 9, 2018 - March 10, 2019
Curator: Mariano Navarro
Space: South Cloister

This retrospective dedicated to Alfonso Albacete (Antequera, Málaga, 1950) surveys an artistic career spanning more than four decades. An architect by training and a fundamental figure on the Spanish art scene, Albacete was one of the leading exponents of the innovations in pictorial practice that began in the 1970s and continued into the 1980s.

The artist came to the attention of the Spanish art world in the late 1970s with an exhibition titled En el estudio, where he combined figuration and abstraction in a single motif that united three genres: figurative, landscape and still-life painting. From that first revelation to the present day, Alfonso Albacete has continued to explore and build on that experience, but at the same time he has never stopped inventing different approaches to the concrete act of painting as an idea-stimulating exercise.

The Reasons of Painting is divided into two sections that offer two different readings, one chronological and the other thematic. The first, stretching along the central corridor, features approximately ten works in chronological order that illustrate the artist’s dialogue with the work of fellow painters. Here visitors will find evidence of his profound analysis of Cézanne and Picasso, his incursions into the art of old masters like Caravaggio and contemporary legends such as Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter, and even expressions imported from other cultures. The works in the central corridor form the backbone of the exhibition, branching off into the vertebrae of the second section housed in the six halls that make up the South Cloister. The six chapters of this segment assemble works from different periods according to the principal motifs, themes and formulations used by the painter. These rooms offer us a tour of what we might consider his symbolic world and the ultimate reasons of his conception of art and the artist’s work: the studio as a place of pictorial generation and execution; the mythologies of different beliefs and the transformation of the symbolic into concrete forms; reflections on the figure and its different modes of representation; the relationship between landscapes and domestic interiors; travel; and the inexorable course of time.

Mariano Navarro

Exhibition produced by Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) with the collaboration of Fundación Maxam