Torres-Garcia and our gallery
Torres-Garcia and our gallery
There has always been a close relationship between Torres-Garcia and our gallery. Next September coincides with a double anniversary that once again unites our trajectory: on the one hand, the 45th anniversary of the foundation of the Sala Dalmau, and on the other, the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Uruguayan-Catalan master. It was therefore a perfect occasion to show his work.
Over the years, the paths of Torres-García and our gallery have crossed in several exhibitions: he has been a regular presence in the shows we have dedicated to the historical avant-garde, but we have also focused on his work in a more specific way in exhibitions such as ‘Barradas, Figari, Torres-García: drawings and watercolours’, which we presented in 1995, or the two exhibitions we have dedicated to his work in a monographic way.
In these 45 years we have wanted to give special relevance to the legacy of Torres-García. The magnitude of this artist cannot be measured only by his work; it is necessary to refer to the enormous influence he has had on the history of art.
View of Torres-Garcia’s exhibition in our gallery, 2009.
At the beginning of his career, he became a pillar of Catalan art: his noucentisme marked an epoch in the first decades of the 20th century, when he created the magnificent murals that preside over the Sala Torres-García in the Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya. Subsequently, ventures as daring as Aladdin Toys, the toy company with which he sought to create assemblable toys of an educational nature and which today are collector’s items, or his work with Mondrian in the magazine Cercle et Carré, made him an essential figure.
But if there is one thing that unites Torres-García and our gallery, it is the interest we have had in showing his teaching facet and the result of this: when he returned to Montevideo in 1934, he founded the Association of Constructive Art and, later, in 1942, the Torres-García Workshop. It was there that he proceeded to teach his great contribution to the history of art, constructivism, to a group of young artists. These teachings would be a revolution in Uruguay and in the whole of South America, as it would be the creation of an avant-garde of its own, without complexes with respect to Europe, whose influence is still valid today.
Exhibitions such as the one we dedicated to the entire Torres-García Workshop in 1998, as well as the solo shows we have presented of some of the most outstanding students of the Workshop, such as Augusto Torres, José Gurvich and Alceu Ribeiro, demonstrate the artist’s relevance.
The link between Torres-García and our gallery has also been seen in exhibitions with a strong presence of artists influenced by him: the exhibition “La huella constructive” presented his work alongside that of artists as disparate in generation and style as Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, Albert Ràfols Casamada, Adolfo Estrada and even young artists such as Pablo Bruera, showing how his influence has spread throughout the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st.