Exhibitions
Soul and matter of Daniel Alegre
The MAS recognizes the legacy of the Cantabrian sculptor with an ambitious, complex exhibition and unpublished works.
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Santander (MAS) has created an exhibition tour necessary to recognize the work and legacy of the artist Daniel Alegre. Soul and Matter is created from twenty-one sculptures, eight of them unpublished, to reinterpret Alegre's artistic evolution, but also the author's conceptualism in parallel with the movements of the time.
Born at the end of the 19th century in Escalante, the MAS presents an exhibition, but also research work by curators Salvador Carretero, José Cobo, Raúl Reyes and Ruth Méndez, in a research path that is already common in the MAS such as with Francisco Iturrino, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Clara Trueba and many others from the autonomous community. With Daniel Alegre, the floor 0 of the Santander museum headquarters is filled with pieces by the artist with an enormous artistic and creative talent that will go from the symbolist and noucentista side, to a more avant-garde one. The exhibition also gives rise to the recovery of pieces and subsequent analyses that were unknown until now.
Asuncion Calderon Gomez de Rueda, Daniel Alegre. © Chema Prieto
A key figure in 20th-century Cantabrian sculpture, Daniel Alegre's work is characterized by a formal sensitivity and remarkable technical mastery. The viewer with Ànima i materia will take a dual look between classical influences, but also modernist, with a key imprint of the artist's own personal and expressive approach. Marble will be an indispensable element where it radiates materiality and spirituality to create a binomial between expression and essence that can be seen in the MAS exhibition.
Alegre lived through that moment of reinterpretation and impetus of the classical world of the early 20th century with key figures such as Aristide Maillol or Josep Clarà, but Alegre creates his own language and does so with heads and busts of white marble that raise a particular inner light such as with Asunción Gómez de Rueda amable from 1925 or Ana Torres-Quevedo from 1926. They are pieces that can transport you to a moment, to an expression, a feeling or a vision, but the artist captures the instant and the figure portrayed.
Jose Cabrero Mons, Daniel Alegre. © Chema Prieto
The exhibition will be on view until June 15 and claims the depth of the human being as did the Symbolists or Neoplatonists with the internal meaning of things and the connection between the elements. Soul and Matter claims the prominent place of Daniel Alegre's art and does so as the artist who fled the stridencies, and also, as Francisco Gutiérrez writes in his book The Forgotten Sculptor, the importance of a creator little known to the general public.
