the essentials A Goya museum more modern than ever. The newly renovated space houses works by three promising young artists until February 25, 2024, three worlds that touch and surprise.
The partnership is not new, it was launched in 2017. This Thursday, the Goya Museum extended its artistic and scientific cooperation with La Casa de Velazquez, located in Madrid, for six years. This French academy in Spain is a place of research, an artist residency directed by Nancy Berthier.
The signing of the agreement with the City of Castres, represented by the deputy mayor in charge of culture Jean-Philippe Audouy, constituted a preamble to a guided tour of the “Echo(s)” exhibition. It is the result of this collaboration and offers the opportunity to discover three artists until February 25, 2024 (the same approach was already popular in 1985 and then in 2004).
“It’s an opportunity to get out of Madrid and Spain,” says Nancy Berthier. “It’s important for us to have the opportunity to export the works of these three artists in a silk setting. Furthermore, the Goya Museum, with its seven centuries of diverse works, offers a quite extraordinary breeding ground for future collaborations. It is very beautiful and very promising for us. The partnerships we implement must be meaningful. We are delighted with this solemn moment.” According to the curator and director of the Goya Museum, Joëlle Arches, “this project has been thought of for two years, with the idea that this “Echo(s)”, a biennial, aims to invite artists to present work that resonates with our collections, to draw inspiration from the masters who are exhibited here.”
Three sequences, three universes
Najah Albukaï, Eve Malherbe and Arnaud Rochard were present Thursday for the inauguration of the exhibition organized in three separate spaces. Like the visitors, they discovered how their work, a set of 60 works produced in Madrid in residence in 2021-2022, was integrated in such a way as to dialogue with the works of the Goya Museum collection.
Intense is the artistic expression of Najah Albukaï, an engraver from Syria, when he apprehends the series of engravings signed Goya, “The Disasters of War”. A vision that sadly fits with current events: “I found this series very modern, I copied it in Indian ink in my studio in Paris. I discovered Goya in Damascus in 2001. Then there was the war in Syria, between 2012 and 2014. The confinement led me to make illustrations in prison. And it’s incredible to find myself here in front of Goya’s works.”
From “Barber” in aquatint to “Shoes”, red chalk on paper, Najah Albukaï’s work is touching and leaves no one indifferent.
Upstairs in the museum, the work of Arnaud Rochard, born in Saint-Nazaire, is multi-technical, full of poetry, between engraving, painting, drawing and ceramics, like his linocuts and oil on canvas, “a lively technique, he explains, by hand, always in squares like ceramic work. Then this invitation to travel “where the image of reality will go somewhere else, expressing a relationship between interior and exterior”, inspired by the Alhambra of Granada.
Eve Malherbe. Eve, Eden: obvious for the artist marked by the painting of the Spanish Golden Age and the Madonnas of Zurbaran and Murillo. Most of his works are made in… dust on glass, plates of glass covered with dust “and I dig into it, with the idea of being able to stabilize this fragility, I like to work on a fragile support” . Perfectionist, it is a way for the artist to accept perfection: “Eden 2022” is an illustration of this, as is also this composite work, “Disappear without ever fading”, inspired by “Venus in the Mirror” , by Velazquez, and produced for the Castres exhibition: “Thank you to the Goya Museum for letting me have fun!”
“Echo(s)” 2023 is poignant, very poetic and baroque. A visit is essential!
#Castres #artists #Echos #Goya #Museum #temporary #exhibition
