Alberto Gironella’s relevance goes beyond his surrealist work: MAM

The Museum of Modern Art (MAM) reported that it will organize an activity to talk in depth about the surreal side by the artist Alberto Gironella (1929-1999), who had a friendship with André Breton (1896-1966), founder and leader of this movement that celebrates its 100 years in 2024.

He was his personal friend because he was surreal, not because he was nice.explained to The Day his son Emiliano Gironella Parra, who remembered a phrase from Breton: Long live Gironella. Surrealism is not dead. However, he explained, in Mexico they do not usually consider it that way and tend to forget it when exhibitions are mounted around that movement.

For example, Gironella Parra was surprised that her father was not included in the section dedicated to surrealism in A prickly pear and a light tower on a deskone of the exhibitions in the program Fictions of modernitywhich opened a few days ago at the MAM.

The room text says: “The works in this section show a series of extraordinary images that result in a game between the perception of the real and the imaginary; works both by foreigners who reformulated their link with surrealism during their stay in Mexico (Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen or Alice Rahon) and by those national artists who refused to be linked with surrealism despite the fantastic nature of their work (Frida Kahlo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo or María Izquierdo).

Also participating are Mexican creators who absorbed part of the enigmatic language of surrealism and painting (Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Montenegro or Carlos Mérida), as well as new generations who added the unusual mechanisms of surrealism to local popular beliefs (Enrique Guzmán, Xavier Esqueda , Pedro Friedeberg or Gelsen Gas).

Brenda Caro, chief curator of the MAM, explained to this newspaper that A prickly pear… It is not an exhibition about surrealismand that all the work included comes from the venue’s own collection, there is no external loan.

He explained that the museum has only six works by Gironella, including object or mixed art, prints and paintings. For its exhibition program, it was decided to work with the collection that “we could safely exhibit, because some of the works are in a conservation process to ensure their durability. One of Alberto’s works, to the mix (1994), mixed on canvas, was exhibited all last year in the exhibition Pop, political, punk; I had to rest.”

According to Caro, the venue does not have works by Gironella linked to his surrealist era. If they had, of course they would have been exposed. The oil Queen Riqui (1974), for example, requires a work of preventive intervention y it seemed risky to place it in the living room.

Among the pieces in the collection there are some with a bullfighting theme, because there was an exhibition, Paint shopsin which many artists participated. A large part of the works from this exhibition were donated to us.; However, “they did not seem relevant to us within the framework of the planned reading of the exhibitions to celebrate the 60 years of the MAM.

Alberto is included in the general program of the six decades. Of course, I couldn’t be outside. He is so relevant that his work appears in the catalog of the most representative pieces of the collection, published on the occasion of the anniversary, because we are completely aware of his figure.

The curator recognized that there are no works by Gironella in A prickly pear…but there is in In conflictanother of the program’s exhibits Fictions of modernity. It’s about oil The inn (1959), included because “from the point of view of the curatorial area it would allow for a much broader reading of the great relevance that Alberto had, beyond his surrealist part, although we understand that some consider that all of his work is surrealist, somewhat which may be up for discussion.

“In conflict It is an exhibition that speaks precisely about the disputes that were relevant in the transformations and changes in the conceptualization of art in Mexico. Gironella’s work was inserted there in order to understand the importance of his production in general, beyond his specific connection with surrealism, but also how his work was disruptive, in the good sense of the term, from the point of view of what it implied for painting and the way of understanding art in our country in a given context,” Caro pointed out.

Gironella is more related to the Ruptura generation. But even when André Breton’s Parisian house was dismantled and its contents auctioned, a fragment of it, the section behind his desk that was what I appreciated mostwas rebuilt at the George Pompidou Cultural Center. At the center of the set of works and objects is a painting by Alberto Gironella, the only one by an artist from the American continent, indicated his son.

Gironella Parra added that if the oil Francisco Lazcano in his workshop (1965-66), which Don Alberto dedicated to Breton, was included in an exhibition on surrealism at the National Museum of Art in 2012 because he insisted. The painting, one of the three by Gironella in the Breton house, by chance of fate arrived in Mexico and was auctioned by the López Morton House for 135 thousand dollars.

Currently, the exhibition is being presented at the Vlady-UACM Center Vlady’s Gironellalthe painters of timewhich includes several books by Breton dedicated to his Mexican friend.