Juan Genovés: Reconsidered
Marlborough Gallery, London
September 9 - October 29, 2022
Juan Genovés
El avion, 1968
Acrylic on canvas, 195 x 130.5 cm
Courtesy of Marlborough, London
The Directors of Marlborough present Juan Genovés: Reconsidered, an exhibition of early paintings by the Spanish figurative painter, created during the height of his political engagement. This presentation offers visitors an opportunity to revisit the work of an exceptional, and in many ways unique artist through a selection of works chronologically bound between 1965 and 1975, paying homage to his landmark exhibition held at Marlborough Fine Art London in 1967.
Juan Genovés was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1930, in the midst of an era of political turmoil during the Spanish Civil War, witnessing the rise of the Franco dictatorship at a young age. This environment catalysed him to emerge as a distinct artistic and activist voice in opposition to fascism and political injustice, informing his visual language and signature motif of the crowd. Developed in the early 1960s, the crowd paintings, which were typically executed from an aerial view, depict groups of people fleeing, hiding, or being harmed by agents of the state, thus creating a landscape of bodies in motion. Juan Genovés’s work was viewed as highly controversial in Spain at the time and banned from being exhibited nationwide.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a new publication contextualizing Juan Genovés’s unique approach to the political context in which he lived. In this book Bartomeu Marí, formerly of The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) and Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), explores the topic of political engagement. For Juan Genovés, being an artist was a form of rebellion in support of the silent side. We discover before us an unusual member of a community of creators, who expanded the frontiers of what we understand as art today. Juan Genovés broadened the thematic vocabulary of post-war painting from a stage that was not very favourable to the arts and artistic experimentation and with his civic action laid the foundation for Spanish avant-garde art in the later twentieth century.
Juan Genovés’s work is found in many significant public collections, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza, Lugano, Switzerland; Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., USA; Instituto Valencià de Art Modern, Valencia, Spain; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec; Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Vienna, Austria; Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, Nagasaki, Japan; Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico.
MARLBOROUGH GALLERY
6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY
