Exhibitions
The Bancaja Foundation makes Sorolla the star of the year
From October 3 to February 8, the Bancaja Foundation will host an exceptional exhibition dedicated to Joaquín Sorolla, becoming a temporary home for some of the most emblematic works from the Sorolla Museum in Madrid.
The temporary closure of the Madrid museum, due to the expansion and renovation of its headquarters, has provided a unique opportunity: to bring together in Valencia a collection of pieces that are rarely seen together outside their usual location. The exhibition will offer the public the opportunity to contemplate some of the Valencian painter's most representative masterpieces, in a selection that stands out both for its quality and its symbolic value within the broader Sorolla legacy.
Joaquín Sorolla. 'A Walk along the Seashore', 1909. Sorolla Museum Foundation.
The Bancaja Foundation, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, the Sorolla Museum, and the Sorolla Museum Foundation, presents Sorolla. Masterpieces from the Sorolla Museum , an extraordinary exhibition that brings together, for the first time outside its usual setting, a unique selection of the Valencian master's pictorial gems.
Sixty works will comprise this intimate and luminous journey through the life and art of Joaquín Sorolla, 59 of which arrive from Madrid, as if responding to a call to return to the painter's homeland. Among them, iconic titles such as "Walk by the Sea , " "The Horse's Bath," and "The Siesta" will accompany visitors on a sensorial journey through the light, the sea, family, and emotion that defined his brushwork.
This exhibition is a milestone not only because of the magnitude of the works assembled—impossible to view together under other circumstances—but also because it reveals masterpieces previously unseen in the solo exhibitions that the Bancaja Foundation has previously dedicated to the artist. A unique encounter with the beauty, light, and soul of Joaquín Sorolla.
Joaquín Sorolla. 'The Siesta', 1911. Sorolla Museum.
Curated by Enrique Varela, director of the Sorolla Museum, the exhibition will unfold in a thematic journey that invites us to discover the artist's many facets throughout his life and work. The itinerary begins with his formative years in Valencia and Italy, where the young Sorolla forged his artistic vision and sensibility. It continues with his consolidation in Madrid, a city where he achieved national and international recognition and where his style became firmly established.
The exhibition dedicates a special space to his virtuosity in portraiture, especially in the family setting, in which Sorolla captured closeness and emotion with unparalleled delicacy. The light of the sea, a constant in his work, takes center stage in a selection of emblematic canvases that the artist himself chose to preserve throughout his life.
His more introspective side is also explored through garden paintings, where color and silence converse harmoniously, as well as his vision of the Spain of his time, captured in popular types and landscapes that form a true visual chronicle of the country. The tour culminates with works created during his stay in Cala de San Vicente (Pollença, Mallorca) in 1919, his final trip to the Mediterranean, where his palette merges, for the last time, with the light that always accompanied him.
