The Carmen Thyssen Museum explores Spanish avant garde at Malaga

Friday, October 10, 2025, at 13:53

In order to start over, we need to return to the beginning, to the nature, and the original art form. The true revolution is to connect with the earthy, primitive and the primitive after breaking the relationship with realism. The Carmen Thyssen Museum of Malaga explores the origins of the Spanish avant-garde and what makes it so unique. It finds them buried beneath the earth in materials and forms. They also find it in the ancestral in a hidden language of signs in caves. In its new temporary exhibition inaugurated by Baroness Carmen Thyssen, the art gallery offers a fresh look at the works of the past century. From the 1930s up to today. “To be here is a joy and happiness for me. She said, “We have been here almost 15 years and the scenery is always beautiful.”

The exhibition is entitled Telúricos y Primitivos. De la Escuela de Vallecas a Miquel Barceló. This exhibition brings together a total 64 works by Spanish artists from all art forms until the 1st of March. Miró, Picasso, Tápies, Manolo Miralles, Chillida, Saura, Benjamín Palencia, Alberto Sánchez, Maruja Mallo, Juana Francés and more. The exhibition is not chronologically ordered and is heterogeneous, but it promotes a clear message: that modern Spanish art has a foundational commonality before and after Spanish Civil War.

In this country, the earthy (telluric), the primitive and all other avant-garde expressions are a part of our DNA. They manifest themselves in a tendency “towards earthy colours, drama and expressiveness” which also has a long tradition in Spanish art, as Bárbara García, curator of the exhibition together with Alberto Gil, both from the museum’s conservation department, points out. The atavistic element is also present in other European avant garde movements but it is “persistent” and “recurrent” in Spain.

Lourdes M. Moreno, the director of Carmen Thyssen, says: “The inspiration comes from wild art and primitivism. Also, it’s a longing to escape a modern world that is in crisis.

A striking piece by Manolo Millares, El Homúnculo (1959), opens the exhibition’s tour as an introduction to this art form. In this piece, Millares uses torn Burlap as a reference to the material which was used to wrap Guanche mummies from his native Gran Canaria. Moreno says that the artist’s abstraction is based on his ancestral past. This idea runs through the entire exhibition. Alongside this work, there is a space given over to the pioneers, the Vallecas School, a surrealist troupe of artists from the 1930s to which Benjamín Palencia, Alberto Sánchez and Nicolás de Lekuona belonged. “It is the first Spanish art group that was supposed to be avant-garde and indigenous. It is a paradox that art with atavistic roots can be rediscovered. Gil notes that there are references to the cave art, a fascination with geology, and a first effort at working with material.

Earth enters the painting, quite literally, with volcanic soil in César Manrique’s Pintura número 100 and also with straw in a piece by Josep Guinovart. In Josep Guinovart’s Paisaje con Paja the primitive and telluric coexist on the canvas with ancestral symbols. Spanish abstraction has been influenced, since the 1940s, by cave art. This was led by the Altamira School. Many of the avant-garde artists were exiled after the Civil War. Those who needed to revive Spanish art did so by looking to the oldest source of art.

Manolo Milleres, Picasso’s two lithographs and Juana Frances from the El Paso group are also reminiscent of these schematics. The painter from the Canary Islands shares the space with colleagues from the El Paso group, such as Juana Francés, Luis Feito, Manuel Rivera and, of course, Saura. They all share another characteristic that defines this period: the “displacement of the human from the focal point”. Expression and the relationship between an artist and the material are paramount. “Painting using material is the major contribution of Spanish Art to the international art scene,” declares curator.

Joan Miró’s large oil painting on sandpaper, in which he embeds nails and a piece of wood from a mill he owned, certainly stands out in the room. “It is very primitive to use materials that are available in your own environment,” state the curators. Chillida’s Hierro sculpture rises in stylised form directly opposite. Two essential names from the avant-garde give way to the “apotheosis” of material in the final part of the exhibition, with a striking painting by Miquel Barceló with textures that protrude from the canvas: Calabazas. Joining him are Saura with Manda (one of his series of works portraying women), Tápies with Rectangles grisos and Gustavo Torner with Blanquísimo- con Chatarra.

Nearly 20 patrons of art have lent works of art to this temporary exhibition, which has benefited from the collaboration of Fundación La Caixa and Soho Boutique Hotels. Francisco de la Torre was also present at the presentation, along with Lourdes and Baroness Moreno and representatives of the sponsoring organizations, Malaga city hall and key museum staff.