Since November, the Gothsland art gallery has been hosting the artistic dialogue that took place between Barcelona and Paris at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries with the exhibition 'Lights of Paris, Colors of Barcelona', an exhibition curated by Gabriel Pinós that brings together more than 130 works by the most renowned artists in painting and sculpture of that era.
In that context, Barcelona and Paris shared a creative energy that was reinforced by events such as the Universal Exhibitions. Barcelona, in 1888, and Paris, in 1889 and 1900, were epicenters of a cultural symbiosis that inspired many Catalan artists to seek new opportunities for experimentation in the French capital. This influence is reflected in Gothsland, where you can see the works of masters such as Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Pablo Picasso and Ricard Opisso , among many others, until the end of February.
'Le vieux marchand', Joan Cardona (1900)
The exhibition also includes pieces by renowned international artists such as Alphonse Mucha, Suzanne Valadon and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec . In particular, an original work by Toulouse-Lautrec is on display that is being presented for the first time in decades on the peninsula. Among the outstanding pieces, we also find the portrait that Ramon Casas painted of Miquel Utrillo , a wedding gift for the creator of the Palau Maricel in Sitges , made on a frame from the United States thanks to the collaboration of Charles Deering. Casas' portrait of Santiago Rusiñol is also on display, in which a landscape that decorates the wall of the studio stands out. This resource, known as a "picture within a picture", reflects on the relationship between reality and its representation, a visual dialogue that delves into the complexity of pictorial language. As Velázquez already did in the Golden Age with works such as 'Las Meninas'.
'Lights of Paris, Colors of Barcelona' is an opportunity to explore the great social and artistic transformations of that period and to discover up close the bonds that were woven in a golden age of art.
Paris – Almanach, Georges de Feure (1894)