Exhibitions
The figuration of the eighties with Liberated Painting
Heterogeneous and colorful mosaic of figurative painting at the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga.
The eighties mark a before and after in Spanish society, postmodernism takes over many sectors of the world of culture and art moves from those gray elements in aesthetics marked by the passage of the Dictatorship to a colorful figuration that recreates the popular culture of the Transition. The Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga creates a particular panorama and does so through the temporary exhibition Pintura alliberada. La joven española figuration dels 80s, curated by Bárbara García Menéndez and Alberto Gil.
Thirty works with more than twenty artists present, have shaped the exhibition route taking the strength of the figurative painting of the eighties that gave way to a new modernity in parallel with the transition and democracy. Vindication in painting, new ways of exploring with pictorial creation and creative proposals that had not been seen in Spain. All of this gave rise to a new figuration of freedom and multicolor loaded with themes, expressiveness and some young artists who wanted to structure and compose from new symbols.
Escena. Personajes a la salida de un concierto de rock, Guillermo Pérez Villalta (1979). MNCARS © Guillermo Pérez Villalta, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025
Until September 14, at the Palacio de Villalón, at the Thyssen headquarters in Malaga, you can see works by Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Carlos Alcolea, Miquel Barceló, Patricia Gadea, Ferrán García Sevilla or Juan Navarro Baldeweg, among others, all of them with Madrid as their common epicenter, the place where the Movida in the eighties emerged within a period of optimism and enthusiasm. However, these twenty artists present in Pintura alliberada, form from a multiform panorama where the viewer will find figuration, abstraction, renewal of the informalism of the past, but always on the way with this new artistic and cultural liberation that took root in Spain in the penultimate decade of the 20th century.
Los borrachos, Carlos Alcolea (1978-1979). Colección Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres © Carlos Alcolea, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025
Characters leaving a rock concert by Guillermo Pérez Villalta is the most representative example of the exhibition. A composition that can transport the visitor to a street in the Malasaña neighborhood, open the door to Penta, a bar known for Mecano's Chica de ayer, and encounter eighties rock music within a festive concert, characteristic of that era in the capital.
Even Pedro Almodóvar will be part of the exhibition and will do so as a collector of the work of Ángel Campano without title. The film director is a key piece of that era and the work is a review of a contemporary world based on a vision of the past in the form of a still life. A dialogue of confrontation without prejudice of that pictorial claim will be the common thread of this exhibition, continuing the path of montages in the past such as Real (ismos) in 2022 or Modernity latent in 2024.
Viaje al Monte Negro, Patricia Gadea (1984). MNCARS © Patricia Gadea, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025
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