Centro Federico García Lorca
among the artists: Mirosław Bałka
Original drawings by Federico García Lorca are exhibited, as well as a set of first editions of books by the author.
The title of the exhibition comes from one of Federico García Lorca’s most celebrated lectures: “Juego y teoría del duende” (Duende: Theory and Play) in which he explains his understanding of Art as something infused with an intrinsic mystery. This is something ineffable that is part of poetry, but also the other artistic disciplines, rendering them irreducible to a mere explanation. In his own words, about duende it is “only known that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all sweet learned geometry, breaks with styles, and relies on human suffering for which there is no solace …”
The “Teoría del duende” (Theory of Duende) exhibition offers a first part featuring original drawings by Federico García Lorca, belonging to relatives of the poet and various public and private collections, as well as a set of first editions of works by him.
The second part presents the works by artists from Lorca’s era, including paintings by Salvador Dalí that belonged to the poet, the two films on which the Catalonian surrealist artist collaborated with Buñuel, and works by other artists that explain their context, including studies for Guernica and surrealist works by Pablo Picasso, and poems and paintings by Joan Miró, as well as by other artists in some way related to Spain: Francis Picabia, André Masson, Roberto Matta and Robert Motherwell.
A third part of the exhibition presents drawings, along with photographs, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations by contemporary artists, some created specifically for the exhibition space at the Federico García Lorca Center. The spectrum is very broad, with explicit tributes to Lorca, or simply works in which the idea of duende, or poetic content, is very important. There are international artists like Olav Christopher Jenssen (Norway), Joao Penalva (Portugal), Juan Uslé, Susana Solano, Victoria Civera, Eva Lootz, Frederic Amat and Miquel Barceló (Spain), Michael Craig-Martin (United Kingdom), Steven Wolpe, Jack Pierson and Terry Winters (USA), Sakiko Nomura (Japan), Francesco Clemente (Italy), Iran do Espirito Santo (Brazil), Guillermo Kuitca (Argentina), Atul Dodiya (India), etc.
Curator: Enrique Juncosa