This year marks the birth of the painter, sculptor and ceramist Maties Palau Ferré (Montblanc, 1921-2000). The Museu d’Art de Girona, in collaboration with the Fundació Palau Ferré de Montblanc, is joining the Palau Ferré Year with an exhibition focused on one of the many facets of this multifaceted artist: that of a draftsman. Palau Ferré, d’un sol traç investigates one of his great passions, drawing, which he progressively simplified until he created it without any continuity, in a single stroke.
The origin and excuse of the exhibition is the work Unitat (1977), an Indian ink on paper that is part of the Art Collection of the newspaper Avui deposited in the Girona museum. Based on this work, the curator of the exhibition, Francesc Marco Palau, proposes an itinerary of approach and discovery of the artist, his values and his career.
In September 2018, at the Girona Art Museum we exhibited the drawing Unitat , an ink on paper work by Maties Palau Ferré (Montblanc 1921-2000), dated 1977, as the work of the month . The performance was part of the annual program “A month, a work “, which aims to study, disseminate and exhibit a piece from the museum’s collection, and allowed us to get to know the Maties Palau Ferré Foundation. The task of protecting and disseminating the artist’s legacy that its members promote, as well as their enthusiasm, seemed certainly commendable to us, and it is. It was then that the possibility of presenting an exhibition of the Montblanc artist at the Art Museum began to be conceived. A proposal that this year sees the light of day and is part of the Palau Ferré Year, which commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth and the twentieth anniversary of his death.
However, it was not easy to define the theme and form of the exhibition. First, because we did not intend to produce an anthological exhibition, conditioned among other things by the time and the exhibition space itself. And also, because we had to be sufficiently singular and complementary to the multiplicity of exhibitions that were being prepared within the framework of the commemorative year. Then, it was certainly necessary to select a theme from the extensive and diverse production of the multifaceted artist, who moved in painting, mostly, but also in sculpture and ceramics.
The pretext for the exhibition, which we now present, could not be other than the only work by the artist that we preserve in the Museu d’Art de Girona. Although it is a minor work, a drawing on paper of reduced dimensions and well removed from his colorful paintings and Chinese inks, it is quite relevant. It is a good example of what was one of his characteristic techniques, the drawings of a single stroke. Drawings that avoid filling the entire paper and are simplified into interwoven lines of colors, in a reductionist exercise of form in favor of the concept.
On the other hand, Unitat is part of the art collection of the newspaper Avui , acquired by the Generalitat of Catalonia and deposited in the Museu d’Art de Girona. The richness of this collection is its diversity, almost like a fixed image of the heterogeneous Catalan artistic panorama of the years of the democratic transition. And, therefore, a good resource for, from the collection, to be able to establish relationships and reveal discourses, always pending, in relation to the art of the second half of the 20th century. Let us remember that the Avui collection was created thanks to the altruistic and supportive participation of a good number of artists who responded to the call for support for the first Catalan-language newspaper after Francoism. Among them, also Palau Ferré, whose vocation and social commitment in favor of this and so many other causes, which he showed in his work and throughout his life, is always emphasized.
For all this, and thanks to the knowledge and predisposition of the curator and promoter of this commemoration, Francesc Marco-Palau, we have woven an exhibition that, while focusing on the facet of Palau Ferré as a draftsman and delving into his more social art, also brings us closer in a subtle way to the entirety of his work and, of course, his life. Thus, from Girona we want to contribute to the Palau Ferré Year a small thread from which to unravel and discover Maties Palau Ferré, in a single stroke.
Carme Clusellas
Director of the Girona Art Museum
2021 has been officially declared the Year of Palau Ferré by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Thus, the celebration of the centenary of the birth of the painter, sculptor and ceramist Maties Palau Ferré (Montblanc, 1921-2000) has an institutional commemoration that allows us to highlight, twenty years after his death, the work and values of one of the most unique artists of 20th-century Catalan art.
When, a couple of years before the anniversary, my sister Rosa de les Neus and I began all the preparations for this artistic anniversary that I have the joy and honor of curating, we immediately knew that we wanted to propose a national commemoration, in which each of the artist’s aspects would be explained in a specific place. Thus, all kinds of thematic and territorial exhibitions and events would be organized, tracing the motives that inspired the art of Palau Ferré and the personal ties that the artist had with writers, architects or designers, and recovering some of the exhibitions and tributes that had taken place throughout his life.
In parallel, we also began a broad task of cataloguing the work of Palau Ferré (paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, etc.), as well as creating an archive about the artist, with all the biographical material (postcards, letters, photographs from the period, press documentation) that would allow us to learn more about an artist who was very close to us as a family, but of whom we wanted to know all the facets.
These two lines of action —the preparation of the centenary exhibition and the cataloguing of works— brought us closer and closer to the Girona Regions. Thus, in the Empordà, in La Selva or in Girona city, we found collectors or admirers of his art who had known Palau Ferré, who had visited him in the Montblanc studio and who had made friends there. Some Girona residents had also played a prominent role in promoting Palau Ferré’s career. This is the case of the journalist Àngel Marsà, who, in an iconic article from 1953, “Un pintor excepcionalment nou”, projected an emerging Palau Ferré in the pages of El Correo Catalán .
At the same time, the Museu d’Art de Girona has a work by Palau Ferré in its art collection. It is an Indian ink from 1977 that the artist gave to the newspaper Avui , as part of a campaign that the newspaper, the leading Catalan press in those years, promoted, with the aim of consolidating a medium of communication that was just taking its first steps and that, with the contribution of works by the main artists of the time, had an outstanding art collection. Currently, this set of pieces, among which is the Unitat de Palau Ferré, is part of the National Art Collection of the Generalitat de Catalunya and is permanently deposited in the Museu d’Art de Girona.
One of the most striking elements of this painting that Palau Ferré painted for the newspaper Avui is that the profiles of its two figures—a girl in red and a boy in black, on a white background—are designed with a single stroke. This is a fact that always brings a smile to the viewer, who tries to mentally retrace the continuity of the line that the artist captured and that immediately motivates the visitor to take up paper and pen and try to also construct figures without lifting the instrument from its support.
Thus, taking into account the entire series of interterritorial links of these years, we soon knew that Girona was the best place to specifically present these single-line drawings that we will be able to enjoy at the Girona Art Museum from May 15, 2021 to January 7, 2022, as part of the commemoration of the artist’s centenary, the Palau Ferré Year.
Francesc Marco-Palau
Doctor in History and curator of the exhibition
