Antoni Fabrés Exhibition at MNAC
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Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjüic, 08038 Barcelona
This exhibition aims to recover the work of a Catalan painter who in his lifetime was very successful, but who has been forgotten.
The exhibition will focus on the work of the sculptor and painter Antoni Fabrés i Costa, who at the age of 25 while a student at the Llotja School in Barcelona, was awarded a grant to go to study in Rome. After he arrived there in 1875, Fabrés devoted himself to drawing, oil painting and watercolor, three techniques that he mastered like none other in his day.
Historiography has placed the work of Fabrés as the continuation of Fortuny’s Orientalism. But Fabrés cannot be pigeonholed in any specific movement, and although he painted orientalist themes common to many artists in the 1880s and 1890s, he also did a lot of realist and naturalist work. He was a great portrait artist who sought, above all, the sitter’s gaze as the principal element. His concern for the light led him to investigate how it influenced colors, in both interiors and landscapes, and some of his paintings could even be described as hyper-realist.
In 1926 he donated a large part of his work to the Catalan Museums Board. It is now conserved in the Museu Nacional and in the former Casa del Comú, in Les Corts (Barcelona).
Opening conference about the exhibition takes place on May 30.
More info here.
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