Exhibitions
Núria Picas under the sign of Taüll
The Valls Museum recovers the career of a unique post-war Catalan artist in an exhibition that claims the footprint of Sant Climent de Taüll in her pictorial language.
In the painting of Núria Picas, the echo of Catalan Romanesque, and especially of the paintings of Sant Climent de Taüll, is transformed into a source of inspiration that runs through the forms, figures and expressive intensity of her work.
This relationship is the starting point of Núria Picas. Under the Sign of Taüll , an exhibition that the Valls Museum will open on September 19 and can be visited until November 29, 2026. Co-produced with the Montserrat Museum, the exhibition will continue later in Montserrat, where a second exhibition dedicated to the artist will be presented from December 18 to February 28, 2027.
Curated by Bernat Puigdollers, art historian, director of the Vila Casas Foundation and specialist in post-war Catalan art, the proposal recovers a figure who, despite having actively participated in the artistic debates of his time, was progressively removed from the main exhibition circuits. The exhibition thus proposes a double operation: to re-situate Picas in the narrative of Catalan art of the second half of the 20th century and to reconstruct the cultural context in which he developed his practice.
The works gathered together allow us to observe how this look towards the past is combined with the concerns of the second avant-gardes. Solemn characters, frontal figures, marked contours and essential forms reveal the influence of the Romanesque universe and, at the same time, a desire for personal expression. Taüll does not appear, therefore, as a simple iconographic reference, but as a visual and spiritual structure from which the artist developed his particular language.
Picas's production, especially during the 1940s and 1950s, took place at a particularly complex time for Catalan culture. The post-war period forced an entire generation of artists to work in difficult conditions, but it also led to the search for new paths to renew the artistic landscape. Picas' participation in the October Salons and his links with various cultural circles of the time place his career within this process of transformation.
Dialogue with his contemporaries is one of the elements that allows us to better understand his contribution. The exhibition includes works by Antoni Tàpies, Josep Guinovart, Marc Aleu, Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Modest Cuixart, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Joan Brotat, Fornells Pla, Claude Collet, Cardona Torrandell, Palau Ferré and Josep Maria de Sucre, among others. Artists from an earlier generation, such as Georges Rouault and Joan Massanet, who had a significant influence on his training and artistic sensibility, are also present.
The recovery of Núria Picas also involves reconstructing a work that for decades has appeared scattered and, for the most part, insufficiently documented. The exhibition project has involved a task of research, localization and cataloguing that allows us to expand our knowledge about her production and open up new avenues of study. The artist herself was able to learn about the project and contribute her testimony to the research that accompanies the catalogue.
His death in January 2026, before the exhibition was completed, inevitably introduces a dimension of homage to the project. But Sota el signe de Taüll wants to go beyond memorial recovery: it proposes to look again at a work and place it within the coordinates of post-war Catalan art, restoring to it a presence that had been diluted over the years.
The exhibition features around thirty lenders and works from institutions such as the Vila Casas Foundation, the Museu de l'Empordà or the Bassat Foundation, in a heritage recovery operation that relates Picas' career to his time.
You may be
interested
...
