from 28th june to 28th august
What has traditionally conferred on an artist the title of master has to do with his skill and technical wisdom, his ability to consummate an artistic discipline in accordance with the paradigms of style or taste of a given period and, from there, with his power to influence generations of contemporary or later creators, recipients and followers of his teachings.
But art teaching is not limited to that. In particular, since the great revolution ushered in by the Impressionists and which has unfurled under many banners over the last century, the consideration of master - which, moreover, has not been sought as such, quite the contrary, in an essentially anti-academic and rupturist art - is rather related to the way in which certain creators have taught, not so much other artists as the public, to experience the work of art differently and, consequently, to experience the world differently. The apprentices for whom this mastery has been intended have been, first and foremost, us.
From this perspective, all the artists brought together for this collective exhibition deserve the title of Great Masters that groups them together. Under different aesthetics, techniques and formats, they have in common the quality and solidity of their contribution to a way of understanding art that has contributed at each moment to opening up or directly breaking new languages, new expressive paths, new ways of doing and, therefore, of receiving and interpreting, assuming, but also surpassing, any teaching received.
In a historical arc that links the pioneering legacy of Miró with the tireless pictorial exploration, still in progress, of Luis Gordillo, each of the authors in this exhibition bears witness to the individual and collective struggle of the plastic creators of a time to construct a pedagogy in action of which their works are fascinating lessons for us: their disciples. For this reason, like each of the Great Masters group shows programmed by Aurora Vigil-Escalera Galería de Arte, this one is also a testimony of another kind: homage, gratitude and the confirmation of the survival of the contribution of creators whose greatest mastery was and continues to be that of audacity, limitless creativity and the awareness that, in art, the best teacher is the one capable of continuing to learn indefinitely new ways of doing in order to incite us to new ways of approaching art; an incitement that continues to challenge us from works that are already part of the history of art, but which remain challenging and alive.
Juan Carlos Gea
