MODEST CUIXART
[1925 - 2025]
CUIXART OVER TIME_
A JOURNEY THROUGH HIS WORK
20 nov 2025 - 30 march, 2026
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Exactly one hundred years ago, Modest Cuixart was born. On this occasion, we are presented with this selection of works of exceptional significance, spanning almost the artist’s entire career, some of them never exhibited before.
The journey begins with works on paper, always characterized by agile and powerful expressiveness, introducing us to the Dau al Set period, imbued with the mystery and magic of that pioneering postwar avant-garde movement in Spain.
Delicately lyrical abstract watercolors give way to the collages of the 1960s, where concern for the human condition emerges, influenced by Bertolt Brecht, which would culminate in the series of burnt dolls (Nins sense nom), a cry against the violence inflicted upon innocent victims.
The vast informalist work of 1961 illustrates a moment in which his celebrated drippings, which had elevated him to the peak of international success —especially at the 1959 São Paulo Biennial—, gave way to a growing sense of space. At the height of his triumph, Cuixart decided to abandon informalism, which he considered exhausted, and anticipated the neo-figurative currents by nearly a decade with an intellectualized language that triumphed in New York —from where these works originate—, where line, sign, and symbols confront matter in an unusual syntax.
When presenting this series in Barcelona, he included subtly unsettling elements, a too vigorous shock in the heart of Francoism, which earned him some critical rejection. He also worked from the utmost humanist expressiveness with object and assemblage, and created three-dimensional works such as this curious No pipa.
The attacks he faced for going against the current prompted his move to the Baix Empordà, where, in the 1970s, he reflected his anguish through baroque figuration, full of deliriums and specters, while exploring hedonism.
By the 1980s, he chose to reveal the hidden vices and banalities of certain social circles from within decadence itself, producing works of striking chromatic intensity as well as others, bitter and dark, born of mourning a close friend. Once this phase was overcome, his work in the 1990s culminated in a rediscovery of his finest achievements through an unprecedented intimate and experiential engagement with secluded nature.
This exhibition reveals an artistic and existential journey: that of an artist driven by constant creative restlessness rooted in an unwavering sense of freedom. Works born of authenticity, from his intimate and perceptive vision of the universe and the human condition. Works of an artist whose significance deserves recognition.
