Carmen Calvo

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Image courtesy of the Picasso Museum.

Carmen Calvo (Valencia, 1950) is one of the most important visual artists in Spain. Through her work, she investigates in a critical, yet poetic way, the vestiges of the past and the memory of Spain. Calvo has carried out multiple exhibitions and public commissions. In 1997 she represented Spain, together with Joan Brossa, at the Venice Biennale. Among her retrospective exhibitions we can find that of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2002) and that of the Kubo Kutxa hall in Sant Sebastià (2019) and the recent major exhibition prepared by the IVAM (2022). She has also created several works for public spaces, such as the ceiling of the staircase of the Benicarló Palace, seat of the Valencian Courts (1994). In 2013 she was awarded the National Plastic Arts Award, in 2014 she was named an academician of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos and her latest recognition came in 2020 when she received the Julio González Award.

After the series Escrituras, Paisajes y Recopilaciones, made with clay brushstrokes, she created still lifes with abstract forms of plaster, iron and clay and worked with found objects full of a great emotional charge. She later moved to the photographic medium, with enlargements of photographs from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s that she manipulates with paint and with objects such as ropes, ribbons, wax hands, hair, masks and needles. They are collective or individual portraits of an era of silence and repression, treated with acidity and irony and, sometimes, touching on surrealist poetry.

This exhibition begins with a small retrospective of the Valencian artist, followed by a set of works that Calvo created during the pandemic. It concludes with works made expressly for this proposal and which are inspired by the work of Picasso.

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