28 January – 27 March, 2016
First Floor
The exhibition Modernity and Contemporaneity in Dominican Art: Works from the Dominican Republics Directorate General of Customs Collection, which will be open to the public, on the Museums first floor, from January 28 to March 27, 2016, is an important example of collaboration between the Eugenio Granell Foundation and the Dominican Republic Embassy in Spain.
The exhibition, curated by María del Carmen Ossaye, shows the modernity and contemporaneity of Dominican art: an exhibition that plays an essential role in the Eugenio Granell Foundations expository discourse. The Dominican Republic received Granell and his partner Amparo Segarro in exile in 1940. On this Caribbean island, Granell developed his plastic project, which would become a reference for many Dominican artists, as would also be the case later on in Guatemala and Puerto Rico.
Granell became, by means of surrealism, one of the promoters of plastic art in the Caribbean. Many young artists gave up traditional representation and adopted European avant-garde art. André Breton met Granell in the Dominican Republic in 1941 and considered him and Wifredo Lam to be the main representatives of surrealism in the Caribbean.
Eugenio Granells work is essential in order to understand the renaissance of Caribbean plastic art, forming part of the islands most important collections, such as the Directorate General of Customs Collection, in which he is represented byone of its key artworks called Figuras, an oil on canvas from 1944.
Eugenio Granell not only became an important plastic art reference but also contributed to the development of creative thinking in Dominican literature. Along with Baeza Flores, he wrote La Poesía Sorprendida. Poesía con el hombre universal, thereby creating an important link between European and Dominican poets and intellectuals.
The Directorate General of Customs Collection, managed by its Cultural Heritage Foundation, features more than 650 works and provides a privileged view of the quality of Dominican art. In this case, by means of a meticulous selection, it gives us a specific idea of how the plastic arts have evolved in the Dominican Republic since the last century.
The most emblematic and influential artists of Dominican plastic art that are present in this initiative include, apart from Eugenio Granell, Josep Gausachs, José Vela Zanetti, George Hausdorf, Celeste Woss y Gil, Jaime Colson, Paul Giudicelli, Darío Suro, Yoryi Morel and Ivan Tovar, the most representative of the islands surrealists that enjoyed an extensive exhibition in the Eugenio Granell Foundation in 2014.
This is, undoubtedly, a good opportunity to get to know the countrys artistic development and to explore the historical bonds that link us with it.
