Between Noucentisme and Avant-gardes (1891-1934). Joaquin Torres García

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949), Sala Parés, in collaboration with the Museo Torres García in Montevideo and the Generalitat de Catalunya, is organising an exhibition featuring around one hundred and twenty works – including oil paintings, works on paper, and toys – that span a broad chronological range: from the artist’s arrival in Catalonia in 1891 to the early 1930s.

In the exhibition, the production of Torres-García from those four key decades intertwines, crucial for understanding his evolution as well as the birth of Constructive Art. Thus, both his eclectic early works, in which academic elements are combined with clear modernist influences, and his extensive noucentista output, culminating in the decoration of the Saló de Sant Jordi – whose sketches have been lent by the Generalitat de Catalunya for this exhibition – reveal a Torres-García whose work increasingly expresses a religious sense of art, beyond the merely formal and aesthetic. This premise is essential to understanding his exploration and quest for a synthesis that would open new paths toward innovative plastic solutions. The young Torres-García is a painter who explores, experiments, and studies, but who, above all, is capable of constructing a personal art aimed at connecting with the essential order through perception and expressing this order through his own artistic vision. As he states in his Notes d’art (1913): “In every great work of art, the idea of each object, more than its reality or particularism, is the essential thing… He sees, in color and form, the expression of that idea.”