Sculpture dialogues with photography in Barcelona. Espais Volart presents the exhibition Maillol Horvat , which includes two samples in one. On the one hand, the world of terracotta by the French sculptor Aristides Maillol, which focused on the female figure as an inexhaustible reserve of inspiration for her works.
On the other, it offers the photographic images that Frank Horvat portrayed from the artist’s pieces. The exhibition, commissioned by Clex Susanna, is the result of the union of two imaginary that merge with each other.
“It is the outcome of a dialogue between a sculptor and a photographer,” Susanna considers in front of one of Maillol’s 18 small terra cotta, which have been provided by the Dina Vierny Gallery in Paris.
“The first is the starting point, the second arrival and, however, both make up the exhibition as a unit”, can be read is a phrase that receives the viewer at the entrance of the exhibition that will be open until December 15 .
Maillol wanted to be a painter and later an upholsterer, but an eye problem forced him to abandon this art and reinvent himself as a sculptor when he had turned forty. The curator delves into the artistic influences he had during his career, especially that of the Frenchman Auguste Rodin.
Years later, b he unchecked Rodin and returned to less explicit language. I didn’t need big movements or gestures to give life to a piece, b he explains.
Susanna states that the woman, to be more exact, her body, was Maillol’s only obsession to recreate the world every day. His works, especially naked and voluptuous female figures, could already be seen in Barcelona in three exhibitions. The last one in 2015 at the Frederic MarC(s Museum. Now, Maillol returns b with an exhibition more linked to his origins as a sculptor,b according to Susanna.
Of the works selected by Horvat for the photographs, half are from the same year, 1900, in full effervescence of the sculptor. The exhibition hosts 59 prints of 80 x 120 centimeters, which had already seen the light for the publication of a book, in 2015, under the same title of the exhibition: Maillol Horvat. But now is the first time that sculptures and images are presented in a museum. All have traveled from Paris.
