Exhibitions
Maricel, memory and return: reconstructing the legacy of Charles Deering
An exhibition at the Maricel Museum recovers 26 works from the Charles Deering Collection and reactivates the memory of Catalan and Spanish art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Sitges Museums present the exhibition Absences and Presences. The artists of Charles Deering in the Banc Sabadell Art Collection , a proposal that reopens an essential chapter in the artistic history of the Maricel Museum and recovers, from the present, the scattered memory of a collecting project that profoundly marked the cultural configuration of Sitges at the beginning of the 20th century.
The exhibition, which can be visited from 2 May to 25 October 2026, is based on a central idea: reconstructing absences. Through 26 works from the Banc Sabadell Art Collection, a story is articulated that allows us to restore, albeit in a fragmentary way, the group of artists linked to the collection promoted by the American industrialist and collector Charles Deering. This recovery exercise not only brings together works, but also reactivates an artistic imagination that had become dispersed and partly forgotten over time.
The group of artists represented offers a broad and diverse vision of Catalan and Spanish artistic modernity from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Essential names such as Santiago Rusiñol, Ramon Casas, Joaquim Mir, Hermenegild Anglada-Camarasa, Joaquim Sunyer, Eliseu Meifrèn, Arcadi Mas i Fondevila, Joan Roig i Soler, Oleguer Junyent, Joan Llaverias, Enric Casanovas and Ricard Canals appear, as well as other prominent figures such as Mariano Andreu, Xavier Nogués, Darío de Regoyos, Josep Maria Sert, Ramón de Zubiaurre, Rafael Durancamps and Jaume Mercadé. This plurality allows us to trace a rich map of artistic languages that range from luminist landscapes to portraiture, including sculpture and works on paper.
Maricel's project cannot be understood without the figure of Charles Deering, who at the beginning of the 20th century promoted the creation of this complex as a space intended to house an ambitious collection of Hispanic art. Although it is known for the presence of great masters such as El Greco, Zurbarán and Goya, Deering also brought together a very significant group of contemporary artists who contributed to building a modern reading of Spanish and Catalan art in dialogue with the European trends of the moment.
Over time, that collection fragmented and dispersed, and with it a fundamental part of Maricel's original story was also diluted. The current exhibition takes this loss as its starting point to propose a symbolic reconstruction of its meaning.
The project also incorporates 17 historical images from the Maricel complex that establish a dialogue between past and present. This visual interaction allows us to broaden our view of the museum and understand it not only as a heritage space, but also as a living place of constant reinterpretation, where artistic memory is reactivated and acquires new meanings.
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