The Girona Art Museum recovers the work and figure of the Catalan and Chilean artist Roser Bru with the exhibition “Roser Bru. Overcoming the Distance”
- Roser Bru, born in Barcelona and exiled to Chile in 1939, is one of the most recognized artists of the 20th century, especially in Latin America.
- The exhibition, curated by Àlex Mitrani and Inés Ortega-Márquez, highlights the exceptional nature of his work, marked by great social commitment, as well as his links with his native Catalonia.
- The exhibition brings together more than a hundred works, most of which are from Chile, but also from Catalan museums and private collections, and recovers the figure of the artist after almost 20 years since the last exhibition in Barcelona.
The Girona Art Museum will open the exhibition “Roser Bru. Overcoming the Distance” next Saturday, November 23, 2024, at 12:00 p.m., dedicated to the Catalan and Chilean painter and engraver Roser Bru (Barcelona, 1923 – Santiago de Chile, 2021), one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, curated by Àlex Mitrani and Inés Ortega-Márquez, marks the return of Bru’s work to Catalonia after almost twenty years since the last exhibition in Catalonia.
Rose Bru
Bru went into exile with his family in Chile at the end of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived there on the legendary ship Winnipeg organized by Pablo Neruda, along with more than 2,000 Spanish and Catalan refugees in early September 1939. Since then, he has developed his artistic career in Chile. He studied Fine Arts there, became involved with Taller 99, a reference in contemporary Chilean engraving, and earned notable recognition there, most notably the Chilean National Prize for Plastic Arts (2015).
She returned to Catalonia in 1958. She then met up with childhood friends and exiles who had already returned, such as Joan Oliver (Pere Quart) or the poet Montserrat Abelló, with whom she always maintained a great friendship. She also rediscovered Romanesque art and was captivated by the informalist aesthetic and the work of Tàpies, two styles that would influence her early works. From then on, she frequently visited and participated in artistic projects, such as the Rosa Vera Editions. Bru always felt Catalan, as well as Chilean, her adopted homeland. As she herself said: “I build in Chilean, but with a Catalan accent”.
The coup d’état in Chile left a deep mark on her and her work became more critical and demanding. Despite this, she never stopped having women as the center of her production, as well as her artistic and literary references – Goya, Picasso, Kahlo, Velázquez and Capa, where she was more interested in the themes they dealt with than in the technique, or references to writers such as Kafka, Anne Frank, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral and Virginia Woolf – and, especially from the 1990s, references to America and Chile, the land that had welcomed her and to which she was always deeply grateful, appear.
Throughout his artistic career, Bru developed his own language and consolidated a unique artistic voice, where engraving and the use of painting on different materials stand out as constants.
In 2018, Roser Bru received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts from the Spanish government, and in 2020 the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat de Catalunya. However, the last exhibition held in Catalan lands was at the Palau Moja in Barcelona, in 2006. Now, the Museu d’Art de Girona is offering this major exhibition with the aim of recovering his figure and promoting his recognition in our country.
The exhibition
Under the curatorship of Catalan art historian Àlex Mitrani and curator Inés Ortega-Márquez, the exhibition is structured around three major thematic axes, constant in Bru’s work: women, as the center and reference of all his work; democratic memory; and the artist’s humanistic and geographical references.
The exhibition brings together nearly a hundred works including large-format paintings and engravings, most of which come from Chile, the country where the artist developed much of his career, but also from museums and private collections. The exhibition aims to highlight the exceptional nature of his life and work, marked by a great social commitment and by an intimate and poetic, but also critical and universal, gaze. At the same time, it underlines Bru’s links with his native Catalonia, and the permanent bonds of friendship with such prominent Catalan and Chilean figures as Pablo Neruda, Pere Quart or Montserrat Abelló.
This exhibition has an extensive catalogue in which there are contributions, in addition to the curators, from Julià Guillamon, Susanna Portell and the artist Paula Bonet, who forged a strong friendship with Bru.
The exhibition and catalogue have been produced with the participation of the Roser Bru Foundation and have had the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the support of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage of Chile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile and the Embassy of Chile in Spain, as well as the collaboration of Casa Amèrica Catalunya.
The opening this Saturday will kick off a wide program of activities, such as guided tours, family workshops and talks to delve deeper into the legacy of Roser Bru. The exhibition, which can be seen at the Girona Art Museum until March 30, 2025, coincides in time with the exhibition “The eel. Flesh as painting and painting as a mirror” by the artist Paula Bonet (Vila-real, Castellón, 1980) at Can Framis (Fundació Vila Casas). Paula Bonet was a student of Roser Bru, and for this reason, the Fundació Vila Casas and the Girona Art Museum have wanted to collaborate by bringing the two exhibitions into dialogue and offering a combined ticket to both shows.