Exhibitions
Torres García and the Universal Order arrive at the Leandro Navarro Gallery
The Leandro Navarro Art Gallery joins the Madrid Gallery Weekend 2025 program with a program dedicated to one of the greatest names in modern art: Joaquín Torres García. Titled "Joaquín Torres García: Another Order," the exhibition brings together more than thirty pieces that offer a broad and revealing tour of the Uruguayan artist's work. Visitors can discover everything from drawings and paintings to the famous wooden toys that the artist conceived as part of his unique aesthetic and pedagogical universe.
Joaquín Torres García, Ice Cream, 1948.
The exhibition highlights Torres García's versatility and his determination to construct his own language, in dialogue with international avant-garde movements, yet deeply rooted in his worldview and his quest for a "constructive order." In this sense, Leandro Navarro's proposal not only allows us to appreciate the formal richness of his work, but also to gain insight into the conceptual and symbolic dimension that permeates his entire career.
The work of Joaquín Torres García is recognized for its ability to build bridges between tradition and modernity, between the local and the universal. The Uruguayan artist developed his own style, which he called Universal Constructivism, a visual language based on geometry and order, but enriched with symbols that refer to the spiritual, the archaic, and the timeless. His compositions are often organized in clear grids, where straight lines, planes of color, and a highly personal iconography coexist, functioning as a veritable pictorial alphabet. They frequently feature suns, boats, fish, clocks, houses, or schematic human figures, elements that transcend the anecdotal to express universal ideas.
Joaquín Torres García, 1928.
His work was not limited to painting: Torres García also explored drawing, sculpture, muralism, and the creation of wooden toys, convinced that art should have a pedagogical and transformative dimension. These objects, conceived in simple and harmonious forms, reflect his interest in learning through play and in the transmission of aesthetic and ethical values. In this sense, his work embodies an intellectual project that unites constructivist rationality with the power of the symbolic and the spiritual.
A remarkable self-portrait painted around 1902 is on display at the Leandro Navarro Art Gallery , accompanied by a selection of paintings spanning his Noucentista period in Barcelona through to his most avant-garde work in the 1930s. The exhibition also includes a set of Constructivist-inspired drawings and a collection of wooden toys.
Each piece by Torres García constitutes a space where modernity dialogues with tradition, where the geometric opens up to the human, and where art becomes a means to understand and organize the world from a universal perspective.
“Torres García is a classic only if we understand his classicism as a system based on an ideal and timeless form of structure—rather than as a style associated with a historical moment, Greco-Roman antiquity, codified by the academies. His idea of the classic is, therefore, that of a higher order perfectly applicable to any place and circumstance: beyond the Mediterranean ideal, the formal structure with which he identifies the classic can be applied, and indeed is applied, to other contexts: it is visible in the urban planning of Barcelona at the beginning of the century and in later New York, but also in the balanced harmony of pre-Hispanic American forms. All these contexts are, in turn, compatible with each other, as some of the pieces in this exhibition show. His is an abstract order in the literal sense of the word, a transcendent and timeless order. It is a metaphysical order.” Excerpt from a text by María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco in the exhibition catalogue
