Tradition and modernity clash in new exhibition focusing on interwar art

A new exhibition at Sala Parés, Spain’s oldest art gallery located in the heart of Barcelona’s old town, takes a look at the turbulent and convulsive interwar period, and the types of art that flourished in Catalonia at the time. 

Bringing together over 100 works of painting, sculpture, print, and other forms, the exhibition moves from noucentisme, a particularly Catalan style of art that developed in the early 20th century, before moving to more post-Impressionist, Cubist, and Surrealist pieces, and features artworks from major names in the Spanish and international scene, such as Josep de Togores, Olga Sacharoff, Manolo Hugué, Helios Gómez, and plenty more. 

In ‘Figurations In Between Wars’, the gallery “wanted to show the evolution of Catalan figuration in art in a tumultuous period,” as Sergio Fuentes Milà, deputy director of Sala Parés and curator of the exhibition, explains to Catalan News. 

Fuentes explains that some artists chose to directly show this “violent, convulsive moment of uncertainty,” but others preferred to “take refuge in landscapes, in still life, in the female figure.”

The exhibition breathes new life into the tension that existed between tradition and modernity seen in the Sala Parés gallery in the Barcelona circuit around a hundred years ago, that defines the complex nature of much of the painting and sculpture of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

Josep M. Junoy wrote in La Veu de Catalunya in 1925 that the Sala Parés gallery played a crucial role in the Barcelona art circuit in the 1920s, exploring “the most beautiful and human of fusions: that of the old and the new, that of tradition and modernity.”

‘Figurations between wars 1914-1945’ is part of the “Memòria” initiative that Sala Parés began in 2017 for its 140th anniversary, with the aim of highlighting the origins of the gallery, one of the oldest in Europe, and the historic artists who have been linked to it.