Roser Bru. Overcoming distance
Dates: 23 November 2024 to 30 March 2025
Opening: Saturday 23 November, 12 noon
Curators: Àlex Mitrani and Inés Ortega-Márquez
Production: Girona Art Museum
In collaboration with the Roser Bru Foundation and with the support of the Chilean Ministry of Culture
Presentation
The exhibition is dedicated to the work and figure of the Catalan-Chilean artist Roser Bru i Llop (Barcelona, 1923 – Santiago de Chile, 2021). Roser Bru was born in Barcelona and experienced her first family exile in Paris at a very young age, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Back in Barcelona, they lived through the proclamation of the Republic and then a second and permanent exile that would take the family first to France and then to Chile, on board the ship Winnipeg, chartered by Pablo Neruda, who was then consul in Paris.
Roser Bru studied Fine Arts in Santiago and maintained a close friendship with Neruda, as well as with other Catalan exiles, especially the writer Montserrat Abelló. In fact, although she developed her entire artistic career in Chile, Bru always kept her Catalan roots and contacts with Catalan artists and writers alive. Her early work was influenced by the iconographies of the Catalan Romanesque, especially the totemic figures of the virgins, and there is also a clear influence from Catalan Informalism, especially the work of Tàpies, whom she discovered on her first trip back to Catalonia in 1958.
Painter and engraver, she became one of the most prominent and recognised artists in Chile, where she was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2015. In 2018 she received the Spanish Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, in recognition and homage to her persona and oeuvre. Five years later she was honoured with the Sant Jordi Cross from the Government of Catalonia.
Bru died in 2021 at the age of 98. Just last year the centenary of her birth was celebrated in Chile, which is now being extended with the exhibition at the Girona Art Museum.
The exhibition at the Girona Art Museum, entitled ‘Roser Bru, Overcoming Distance’, allows us to see Bru’s work in Catalonia again after almost 20 years. The exhibition, co-curated by Àlex Mitrani and Inés Ortega-Márquez, aims to highlight Roser Bru’s Catalan origins, as well as the emotional and artistic ties she maintained with Catalonia. In parallel, it aims to revive her persona and career, with a proposal based on three subject based axes – female iconographies, democratic demands, and humanistic and geographical benchmarks – as well as revealing the dimension of Roser Bru’s work and making it present, once again, in Catalonia.
The exhibition project is being developed and has received the encouragement and support of the Chilean embassy in Spain and the Chilean Ministry of Culture, and the collaboration of the Roser Bru Foundation in Chile, as well as special support from the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Catalonia and the accompaniment of the Ramon Llull Institute and Casa Amèrica Catalunya, among others.
This exhibition in Girona brings together and presents a large number of the artist’s works and prints, as well as documents and objects, most of them from Chile. In total, 30 paintings and 40 engravings in various formats, most of them owned by the Roser Bru Foundation in Chile, but also loans of outstanding works from museums and private Chilean collections. These are presented together with some 25 paintings, engravings and documents from national museums, such as the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the Library of Catalonia and several private Catalan collections, which highlight Bru’s permanent link with her homeland.
In total, the exhibition brings together some 100 works, engravings and documents by Roser Bru, and is sure to be one of the most outstanding exhibitions of the season.
Collaboration with the Fundació Vila Casas
The exhibition takes place at the same time as the exhibition ‘The Eel: Flesh as Painting and Painting as a Mirror’ by artist Paula Bonet (Vila-real, Castellón, 1980) at Can Framis (Vila Casas Foundation). Paula Bonet was a student of Roser Bru and, for this reason, the Fundació Vila Casas and the Girona Art Museum wanted to collaborate by bringing the two exhibitions into dialogue and offering a combined ticket to both exhibitions.
