This Thursday, the Bancaja Foundation presented the exhibition In the sea of Sorolla with Manuel Vincentproduced with the collaboration of the Sorolla Museum and the Sorolla Museum Foundation and framed in the Sorolla Year as the closing of the program for the centenary of the death of the Valencian painter. The presentation had the participation of the president of the Bancaja Foundation, Rafael Alcón; the writer Manuel Vicent as literary commissioner; and the director of the Sorolla Museum, Enrique Varela, artistic curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition offers a innovative exhibition proposal in which the writer Manuel Vicent carries out a literary curation around the work of Sorolla, establishing a dialogue between painting and literature with the Mediterranean as a common thread.
After its first exhibition in Madrid, the exhibition is presented in Valencia with an expanded selection of works which includes 109 canvases dated between 1886 and 1920. The exhibition route includes masterpieces by Sorolla which exceptionally left their home at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid, such as Leaving the bath (1915), Bath time, Valencia ( 1909), The Valencian Fishermen (1903) or After the Bath, Valencia (1909).
All of the works collected come from the collections of the Sorolla Museum, the Sorolla Museum Foundation, the Bancaja Foundation, the Provincial Deputation of Valencia, the Hortensia Herrero Collection, as well as private collections.
Through history and evocations of Manuel Vicent’s own experiences, a tour in four sections for the rich depiction of the Mediterranean in Sorolla’s work: The Subconscious Is Full of Seaweed, including his iconic paintings of children playfully depicted on the beach; A naturalist drama in the light of the Mediterranean, with scenes of fishermen during and after fishing; The Bourgeois Vacationers of Cabanyal, which shows images of members of the Valencian bourgeoisie represented by the artist; and In the sea of Xàbia, with scenes that reflect the strength of the landscape that he captured in his paintings of this coastal enclave.
The words of Manuel Vicent review, from experience and literary creation, the spaces that Sorolla inhabited and transferred into his paintings, and which offer a broad view of life around the Mediterranean Sea in the period between centuries. The two creators come together in the same naturalistic vision which results in an exhibition experience in which a new reading of Sorolla’s works is proposed through Vicent’s biographical and literary narrative.
In this story, Manuel Vicent reconstructs his own memory around the sea, gives voice to the life that underlies the universal iconography of Sorolla and, at the same time, reflects on the luminist aesthetic of the painter and on his positioning as than an artist.
The exhibition is completed by vintage photographs with Sorolla and its settings in the Mediterranean as protagonists and with an audiovisual produced for the project in which the writer Manuel Vicent recounts his experiences and connects them to the scenes reflected by Sorolla in his paintings.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalog was published with the reproduction of the works that are part of the exhibition, as well as the literary story that Manuel Vicent wrote as an original work.
As part of its cultural and artistic mediation program, the Bancaja Foundation offers guided tours for the general public and groups, but also educational workshops for schools, disabled people, groups at risk of exclusion and the elderly.
The exhibition In the Sea of Sorolla with Manuel Vicent, which has the collaboration of A&G, can be visited at the headquarters of the Bancaja Foundation in Valencia (Plaza Tetuán, 23) from October 4, 2024 to March 9, 2025.
