Curator: Cristina Ros

During the first years of the twentieth century, with Mallorca as the preferred artistic destination, begins with the renovation of landscape painting, which, in Spain, was undertaken particularly by painters from the Catalan region. Modernism was imposed on painting and with it arrived a new way of looking at nature or, in the words of Miquel dels Sants Oliver, of listening to it as one might listen to music or to a poet. Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquim Mir, Anglada-Camarasa, Sorolla, Tito Cittadini and the Mallorcan, Antoni Gelabert, are some of the outstanding figures from this interpretative freedom of depicting the landscape which, up until that time, had been unknown in these lands.

Despite the distance of almost a century, with Modernism already far in the past and having passed from modernity to postmodernity, we can see certain coincidences among particular present-day artists in the Es Baluard collection, who also listen to nature and their Modernist predecessors. For example, the German, Anselm Kiefer, and the Mallorcan, Miquel Barceló, although their work goes far beyond the nature it depicts, in their paintings the volumes also take on weight, the brushstroke also acquires body and the work of the material also contributes to making it more expressive. Landscape painting as an innovative trend at the beginning of the twentieth century, the incorporation of nature into painting as a practice that is out of step with the arrival of the twenty-first century, two paths that are distanced from each other but that establish a stimulating dialogue in their confrontation.