On April 23, 1976, the first issue of the newspaper Avui was published, the first Catalan-language newspaper after the Franco dictatorship. The newspaper was born under the pressure of a large part of Catalan society and received broad support, including that of artists. Practically all the artists of the time, in fact, responded to a previous call to donate a work to help consolidate the company. This was the origin of the art collection of the newspaper Avui . In a short time, the bulk of the donated works formed a collection that was very chronologically coherent, but also very representative from an artistic point of view. For this reason, in 2011, and after the bankruptcy of the company Premsa Catalana SA, publisher of the newspaper, the Generalitat de Catalunya decided to acquire, at a price below market, the 604 works that then constituted the collection. This initiative avoided the disintegration of a historically and artistically significant collection and also a possible export of works outside Catalonia.
After the acquisition, the collection was divided into two large blocks. The first block consisted of the 24 original covers that the newspaper commissioned from various Catalan artists over twenty years. The entire collection was deposited at the Museum of the History of Catalonia, which in 2011 dedicated an exhibition in which the originals were related to the published covers and which emphasized the more historical side of the newspaper. The rest of the works, the main bulk, were deposited at the Museu d’Art de Girona, in order to reinforce its collection with works of contemporary art. The lack of space in the Museum, however, forced the works to be kept in the custody of the monastery of Vilabertran, where they had been deposited since 1991 and where they had been exhibited on a rotating basis until 2004. Since then, the works have been preserved in the warehouses of Vilabertran and, although they have been loaned out occasionally, the set has not been shown again in an exhibition.
Now, the Girona Art Museum wants to shed new light and visibility on this rich and varied collection. The timing is ideal, just as the city of Girona is working on the project for a contemporary art museum and coinciding with a general interest among Catalan museum institutions in Catalan art from the second half of the 20th century, which is rarely found in public collections.
However, proposing an exhaustive exhibition of the entire art collection of the newspaper, made up of 580 works, would be an unattainable undertaking in terms of space and resources, but also conceptually. It seems reasonable that, faced with such an extensive, varied and rich collection, diverse and plural readings should also be proposed and, therefore, not a single exhibition, but a succession of exhibition proposals that allow, on the one hand, to show the collection little by little and, on the other, to offer enriching reinterpretations from different perspectives and curatorial viewpoints. At the same time, and in a more internal work of the Museum, the various exhibitions will serve to condition the works and, to the extent possible, relocate them in new internal and external storage, offer them for other temporary exhibitions or incorporate them into the current and future permanent exhibitions of the Art Museum.
We have entrusted the first of these exhibitions to the historian and art critic Pilar Parcerisas, who, in addition to being art critic for Avui , coordinated and promoted the expansion of the newspaper’s art collection from 1994, when new donations from younger creators were incorporated. Parcerisas’ exhibition proposal traces the trajectory of the arts in Catalonia from the seventies to the nineties, starting from the abandonment of informalism in favor of abstraction and the transition, without a solution of continuity, towards conceptual art. Her selection, on the other hand, brings together in a single exhibition the most significant names in Catalan art of this period.
We begin this cycle of exhibitions with an exhibition that offers a synthetic but, at the same time, almost complete tour through some defining moments of contemporary art in Catalonia, which highlights the diversity and evolution of Catalan art over three decades, from the seventies to the nineties, and which provides a first reading to rediscover the richness of a collection, that of the newspaper Avui , which has become a witness to an era.
