BELGIAN ART IN VALENCIA AT 'FUNDACIÓN BANCAJA' FROM APRIL TO JULY 2023! • 24/7 Valencia

Fundación Bancaja has presented the exhibition ‘Belgian Art. From Impressionism to Magritte.’ The exhibition covers the main pictorial trends in Belgium from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century via 77 works by 53 artists, including such renowned names as James Ensor, René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. This new exhibition brings together, for the first time in València, great masterpieces of Belgian modern art from the collection of the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels. The presentation was attended by the head of Culture at the Bancaja Foundation, Laura Campos, and the curator of the exhibition and director of the Belgian museum, Claire Leblanc.

The exhibition offers a complete and unique panorama of the main pictorial trends developed in Belgium from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. The best of Belgian modern art is presented through 77 works by 53 artists, including such renowned names as James Ensor, René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, alongside other great Belgian artists such as Jan Toorop, Émile Claus, Anna Boch, Fernand Khnopff, Léon Spilliaert and Jos Albert, among many others.

The exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Belgian museum and the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, reflects the artistic evolution in Belgium… from realism to surrealism, passing through the avant-garde movements developed in this period of the search for modernity in which Belgian art stood out for its creative freedom, dazzling colour and enigmatic atmospheres. The collection of works reveals the international influences from which Belgian art drew and, at the same time, its specifically local characteristics, giving rise to highly advanced proposals in which creative daring and the tension between attachment to reality and a propensity for overflowing imagination coexist.

With a chronological discourse, the exhibition is structured around four sections corresponding to different pictorial movements: from realism to modern landscape; impressionism and its derivations; symbolism and the fauvist and expressionist avant-garde; and surrealism.

Highlights of the exhibition include Louis Artan’s Dunes (1872), an example of the birth of modernism in Belgian landscape painting; Jos Albert’s The Great Inland (1914), with its explosion of colours linking the artist to French Fauvism; Jan Toorop’s The Lady with the Parasol (1888); and Anna Boch’s Dunes in the Sun (c. 1903), by Anna Boch (c. 1903), which is an example of the birth of modernism in Belgian landscape painting. 1903), by Anna Boch, which are examples of the best Impressionism produced in fin-de-siècle Belgium; The Happy Donor (1966), by Magritte, with its unmistakable silhouette of a man in a bowler hat; and the classically inspired dream of The Courtesans (1944) by Delvaux.

Coinciding with the exhibition, a catalogue has been published with reproductions of the works on display, accompanied by texts by the curator. The exhibition includes a screening of the documentary Monsieur René Magritte, directed in 1978 by the filmmaker Adrian Maben. The film featured Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) and the pianist Béla Bartók, composers of the soundtrack. As part of the cultural and artistic mediation programme, the Bancaja Foundation will offer guided tours led by an expert specialist in art and cultural mediation.

The exhibition ‘Belgian Art. From Impressionism to Magritte’ can be visited at the headquarters of the Bancaja Foundation in Valencia (Plaza Tetuán, 23) from 5 April to 30 July 2023.

Report by ’24/7 Valencia’ team

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‘Belgian Art. From Impressionism to Magritte’

From April 5th to July 20th 2023

Address:

Fundación Bancaja

Pl. de Tetuan, 23

València

46003

Tickets:

General: 7 euros.