On February 13, the Museo ICO will open 'Picasso's Vollard Suite and Spanish Engraving in the Museo ICO Collection'.
The exhibition proposes an exhibition dialogue between Picasso's masterpiece of engraving, the Vollard Suite –which will be displayed in its entirety–, and a selection of engravings and paintings by artists such as Juan Genovés, Eduardo Arroyo, Manolo Valdés, Miguel Ángel Campano and Darío Villalba. Names that shaped the language and trends of contemporary art in Spain during the second half of the 20th century.
The exhibition, curated by the Art Department of the ICO Foundation and made up of works acquired by the Official Credit Institute (ICO) in the 1990s, is in line with the main mission with which the ICO Museum was founded: the conservation and dissemination of its collections. It thus constitutes a unique opportunity to get closer to works that are not normally on display to the public and, in particular, to enjoy in Madrid one of the few complete sets of Picasso's Vollard Suite that exist in the world, which was last exhibited in its entirety in the capital more than a decade ago, in 2012.
Open to the public until July 20, the exhibition will feature the usual extensive outreach programme which, through guided tours and dynamic activities, will bring the works and their authors closer to all visitors, using the practices that identify the ICO Museum as a constant laboratory for accessibility. In this sense, the exhibition will have materials adapted to the tour in Easy Reading, Sign Language Interpreter (ILSE) on demand for all the activities offered, and proposals designed for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. With the Empower Parents programme, now in its twelfth edition at the ICO Museum, new families with children with autism will be welcomed.
The Vollard Suite, considered the most important series of contemporary prints, is made up of a total of one hundred works produced between 1930 and 1937, a period in which the collaboration between the art dealer and gallery owner Ambroise Vollard and Pablo Picasso reached its peak. The Vollard Suite was the result of a friendly and commercial exchange between them, as in 1937 Vollard obtained the initial series of 97 copper engravings of the Suite in exchange for a significant number of paintings of his own that Picasso wanted for his private collection.
Divided into different thematic blocks, it explores the evolution of Picasso's creative and personal obsessions: The Sculptor's Studio, The Battle of Love, The Minotaur or Portraits of Ambroise Vollard. The engravings, arranged in chronological order, are also an opportunity to explore the different techniques used by the Malaga artist in this discipline, such as etching, aquatint, burin or drypoint.
The ICO collections comprise the collections of Spanish sculpture with drawing, contemporary Spanish painting and engraving that the ICO Museum, inaugurated in 1996, exhibited permanently until 2012, when it specialized its exhibition program in the fields of architecture and photography. Since then, a large number of the works have been requested on loan by national and international museums and cultural institutions.
In this sense, the exhibition The Vollard Suite of Picasso and Spanish Engraving in the ICO Museum Collection makes visible the origin of the latter and of the ICO Foundation, showing the artistic treasures it preserves, without losing its identity, taking a look at the most consolidated contemporary Spanish art.
On the occasion of this exhibition, a total of 54 engravings and 8 paintings by outstanding artists will also be on display, almost all of whom were awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Juan Manuel Díaz-Caneja, Manuel Boix, Albert Ràfols-Casamada, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Luis Gordillo, José Hernández, Eduardo Arroyo, Rafael Canogar, Josep Guinovart, Lucio Muñoz, Alfonso Fraile, Manolo Valdés, Darío Villalba, José Caballero, Manuel Hernández Mompó, Juan Genovés, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Juan Barjola. This set of engravings is on display on this occasion alongside some of the paintings by these same artists, which allow us to appreciate the variety of disciplines they practised and the stylistic constants common to their works.
The selection is completed with the series Nine Nocturnal Animals, by Miguel Ángel Campano (National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1996) and Dadá Collection, by Fernando Bellver (National Prize for Graphic Art in 2008).
The exhibition is an invitation to art enthusiasts, particularly to the new generations who have not yet had the opportunity to admire the Vollard Suite and the work of the artists who left a deep mark on the Spanish art scene at the end of the 20th century.
