A groundbreaking museum without styles or chronologies where Demeter meets Dalí

Fig treesThe Empordà Museum, located at the foot of the Rambla de Figueres, has just reopened its doors after four years of renovations that have completely transformed its image. In this new phase, the museum presents the pieces from its permanent collection with a groundbreaking idea: they are no longer displayed in the traditional way, grouped by criteria of chronological order, authorship, style, or genre. Instead, the new museography proposes a truly surprising and exciting artistic journey, displaying diverse works dating back more than 4,500 years in a single room. Like the painting Saint Narcissus (1962), by Salvador Dalí, exhibited together with the Saint Atilano (1690), by Vicente Berdusán, in a space where there is also a possible Demeter Greek statue from Empúries from the 3rd or 4th century BC, a surrealist pantocrator (1929) by Joan Massanet and a bronze bull (1975) by Emília Xargay.

Other relevant names in the collection are Antoni Tàpies, Olga Sacharoff, Roser Bru, Tura Sanglas, Pere Noguera or Denys Blacker, which, combined with unique pieces by the Master of Cabestany or medieval and baroque paintings, invite the public to explore the history of art with an open mind.

The new museum discourse is articulated around the conceptual diptych People and places: on the first floor, people The first is in front, and the second is behind, which highlights the philosophical nuance between both concepts, which make up the world in equal parts and cannot be understood separately. The radical change of the museum responds to the express desire of the director, Eduard Bech Vila, to open this public facility with eighty years of history to the public, moving away from the ivory tower of the academy and closer to the everyday concerns of ordinary people. To this end, he carried out the renovation following a participatory process and an extensive field study that gathered the opinions of more than 500 people, from residents and visitors to the city to artists and experts in art curation.

Attention to cultural and gender diversity

"With this new museum, we wanted to build a stronger connection with our audiences, with the city, and with the people who visit us, and that's why it's necessary to talk about the issues that concern society. After many surveys and workshops, we saw that the public is interested in topics such as cultural diversity, gender issues, territorial preservation, emergencies, and more. people and positions, which basically are the world," explains Eduard Bech Vila. The desire to involve citizens in the museum's decision-making is perfectly consistent with the hallmarks of Bech Vila's mandate, who during these years has worked to incorporate the gender perspective and the LGBTI perspective into the traditional canons of art history. The policy of the current permanent exhibition, 20% of the works are by women artists.

Based on the matrix People and places, the museum commissioned the development of the museography in Pere Parramon, current subdelegate of the Spanish government and a doctor in art history, already Cristina Masanés, writer and exhibition curator, responsible for putting the survey results on the museum walls. In this process, they decided to structure the visitor's journey through infinitive verbs, accompanied by highly poetic texts that generate more questions than answers. These are universal actions and gestures, such as walk, love, want, exchange, to blow out, be either meet, which serve as a common thread between all the works, selected by both curators, with an underlying coherence that, without being explicit, generates many connections and reinterpretations, in the style of Walter Benjamin's constellations or Aby Warburg's iconographic atlases.

Calvaries, virgins, homeless people and shopping carts

Each room is a discovery that breaks the visitor's norms. Surprising encounters occur, such as the Persist room. with a painting ofArt Nouveau by Lluís Masriera of a woman lying down, next to a vanitas Cubist by Evarist Vallès, a black silk suit in the corner, and a gloomy landscape by Joan Ponç. Or even more daring are the spaces in Encontrarse, with a photograph by Luis Obispo of a circle of supermarket carts next to Calvary, by Ramon Tusquets; or the entrance to the first floor, with a late Romanesque Virgin and an image of a homeless person by Jordi Mitjà that subtly speak to the contradictions of the human way of life.

"In the museum surveys, it didn't seem like people were specifically asking for art, but questions about who we are and the place in which we live, and from there we have tried to build a story with areas totally removed from the academy, such as these actions, which summon us all, both physically and metaphorically," explains Cristina Masanés. The curator also highlights that, by consciously mixing power above all "Art museums must take on a subject that universities and schools explain less and less, such as the notion of temporality, of awareness of historical time." This does not mean making chronologies, since the idea of mixing contemporary pieces with archaeological pieces, medieval or modern painting, which we do, is a way of telling people that the concerns we have today were already had by prehistoric people," concludes Masanés.