The Tàpies Museum celebrates the legacy of Àngel Jové with an exceptional exhibition

BarcelonaThe artist Àngel Jové, born in Lleida in 1940 and died in October 2023Jové is considered one of the great Catalan artists of the second half of the 20th and the 21st century. He was a multifaceted artist. He was part of the groups Cogul and El Maduixer. He was one of the leading Catalan conceptual artists. He participated in the first video art piece in Spain. First deathAnd, in his own way, he was one of the leading figures of Catalan pop art. He also collaborated on some of Bigas Luna's early films, designed lighting for the Zeleste theater, and created dozens of book covers for the Anagrama publishing house. Even so, he remained a cult artist.

Now, two and a half years after Àngel Jové's death, the Museu Tàpies is showcasing his entire legacy in its first retrospective: an unmissable exhibition featuring some 1,400 works, mostly drawings, 70% of which are being shown for the first time. With this exhibition, curated by art history professor Maria Josep Balsach, who was his partner, the museum reveals the work Jové quietly produced, especially from the 1990s onward. "This exhibition shows everything Ángel did while creating the most well-known part of his work. It's very important to see the work he did throughout his life," explains the curator. "What he wanted was to finish his work. He had a kind of desire to shut himself away in the studio and create a body of work that, more than anything, he wanted to create works that could generate a certain excitement. He wasn't excited about galleries, the art market, or art fairs."

Imbued with collective pain

As can be seen in the opening work, Jové's oeuvre is imbued with "melancholy," and as one progresses through the exhibition, it becomes clear that this melancholy stems from the impact of the Civil War, the misery of the postwar period, exile, and the horror of the Holocaust. Very often, all of this is evoked in everyday scenes, in drawings that seem to be fading away, in images of a baby or a rabbit before it is slaughtered, and in family photographs manipulated to suggest a hostile environment. Jové was one of them, but he seems to have absorbed the collective pain of his time in order to sublimate it. Sometimes, he did so in collaboration with poets, among them Cesare Pavese, Màrius Torres, Paul Celan, and Carles Hac Mor.

"Jové also interests us because of his connection to the present," says Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies. "Unfortunately, it remains relevant because of all the conflicts of our time," she adds. "The great thing about the Angel is that it's not literal. He doesn't represent the war or the conflict itself, but rather the consequences. In other words, who suffers that pain in the end? The most vulnerable, the children, the mothers..." Sometimes Jové stamped the motto "undated" on some of his drawings, which means that a work related to the Spanish Civil War can reflect later defeats like the Bosnian War. But even so, Prieto also emphasizes that Jové's work has a point of "light and hope."

Fragility, the cry, and compassion

The exhibition is titled Ángel Jové. From intactThis refers to the idea of ​​a world that is recomposed and becomes immaculate once more. The installation is on par with the content: in the museum's main hall, a cube placed on its edge draws everyone's attention. On the outside, it is covered with the series of monochrome, autobiographical paintings. I would like to leave the house (2015-2020). Inside, the major themes of his work are represented in various sets of drawings from the mid-seventies. "There's the theme of vulnerability, those children falling apart, the presence of fragility, also of passion... There's also the image of the scream, and illumination, which go together... Jové's painting is very philosophical, very political," says Balsach. Most of the works on display come from his archive, and there are also pieces from public collections such as those of the MACBA and the Museu Morera in Lleida.

Among the best-known works in the exhibition, which will remain open until September 27, are the pioneering photographs manipulated with aniline dyes. Further on, there is a selection of drawings from the series vs Limbus“In this series, the landscape is a non-place, limbo, a space that is neither hell nor heaven, a space that perhaps represents the place we inhabit as humanity,” says Balsach. The reflection on the series came later, and Jové realized that this work perhaps draws from Dante's work. “It is an interior space, an interior landscape,” the curator concludes.

Del Italian notebook (1976-1981), Balsach points out how Jové used the image of a concentration camp to raise the issue of the viewer's "passivity" in the face of the horror that surrounds us. Furthermore, a series of paintings reveal how Jové worked with the idea of ​​"alchemical gold." "Alchemical gold is death and life, light and darkness, gold and blood. He always works from a space of matter and light. Matter and light go together, pain and wonder go together. Life is precisely that cyclical movement through that union of opposites." This series is very abstract; the stains may be faces. "It's about the alchemical space of transformation, about trying to transmute the darkest part of the human being," he explains.

The other major highlight of the exhibition is the two underground rooms: one houses the more than 300 drawings from the series Christopher Pavese 1908-2008On the other, a selection from one of her latest exhibitions, Über allesIn the Exile Memorial Museum, he evoked, like a glimmer of hope, the landscape seen daily by prisoners in concentration camps. And a series of sculptures made from humble materials. In three of them, which were displayed in a deconsecrated church, Prieto sees the "absent presence" of Jové himself: hands holding a plate and spoon, stray pieces; hearts made of crystals; and an empty chair made of wire.