SALVADOR BARTOLOZZI
21st March to 27th May 2007
‘Salvador Bartolozzi (1882-1950). Dibujante castizo y cosmopolita’ adds to a series of exhibitions that the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo has dedicated to other representative figures of this rich and vast field of graphic illustration such as Delhy Tejero (1904-1968) and Enric Climent (1897-1980), two artists who shared space, time and ideas with Bartolozzi during that intense and splendid period in Madrid which is today considered a Silver Age of visual and literary culture in our country.
This exhibition showcases the different activities that Bartolozzi developed as illustrator in publications and editorials such as children’s literature, posters and as independent illustrator during his time in Paris, Madrid and Mexico.
The exhibition is structured along the following sections:
1. Cafés, taverns, tea houses and American bars
2. Humorous works, cartoons and children’s
3. Feminine portraits
4. Everyday environments, literary, symbolic, pure and bourgeois
5. Posters
The exhibition brings together an important collection of drawings by an artist who worked intensely as an illustrator of the most important novels and magazine stories, books and literary collections of his era: La Esfera, Nuevo Mundo, España, Blanco y Negro, El Cuento Semanal, El Libro Popular, la Novela de Ahora, Los Contemporáneos, La Novela de Hoy and La Novela Semanal. It is a significant selection of drawings, watercolours and original posters that cover the work of the artist from his early years, in which we can observe a tendency towards expressionist and modernist costumbrism, through his Art Decó stage and ending with work from his Mexican exile in which there is a marked naturalist and pure accent.

LUCIO MUÑOZ (1929-1998). PLASTIC IDENTITY OF A GENERATION.
26th April to 2nd July 2007
The inauguration of this exhibition coincides with the opening of a room on the second floor of the Museum dedicated exclusively to Muñoz during a two-year period.
The exhibition itself is a sincere and deserved homage as well as a look back at the profound and magisterial career of one of the most innovative artists in Spanish contemporary art. Muñoz’s artistic trajectory is also closely linked to our city, prime examples being the mural Ciudad inacabada for the Asamblea de Madrid’s new building.
The exhibition is an anthological journey through the artist’s work between 1952 and 1997 and highlights the strong link he maintained with colleagues and friends from his generation as well as younger creators with whom he also had a close professional relationship.
The works on display are a detailed selection commissioned by his son Rodrigo Muñoz Avia and Eduardo Alaminos, director of the Museum. It is a splendid selection that brings together a total of 75 works from the collection of Lucio Muñoz and Amalia Avia, creating a chronological discourse on the years 1952-2005 and organised along three illustrative lines:
The first gives us a biographical sketch of the artist through personal objects and photographs from the family album. These give us an excellent opportunity to observe the artist during moments of creation and work in the studio or surrounded by artists with whom he had a deeper relationship than the purely professional and which gave, without a doubt an important foundation to his work.
We can also enjoy an anthology of the artist from his early years, during which he takes on landscapes and still lifes and in which the generosity of paste, his predilection for a ‘dirty’ colour spectrum of greys and greens and special attention to the ordering of structure with the characteristic struggle between order and chaos reveal a palpable sense of his evolution towards the informalism and abstraction of the 60s.
Finally, the third space is dedicated to a selection of works among which Muñoz’s contemporaries and friends can be seen - Amalia Avia, Antonio López, Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Manuel Rivera, José Guerrero, Tàpies, Sempere, Mompó, Julio López Hernández, Salvador Victoria, Equipo Crónica, Joaquín Ramo, Enrique Gran, Frederic Amat -, as well as younger artists who were students or collaborators of the artist: Montserrat Gómez Osuna, Manuel Robledo and Alfonso Sicilia Sobrino.
All in all this is an exhibition that allows us to look deeply into the realist and informal environment that surrounded the artist throughout his life and the works that formed part of his intimate family space.



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