Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the studio

From 01 March to 19 June 2016
http://www.museothyssen.org

In conjunction with the Denver Art Museum, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting the first retrospective in Europe on Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, leading figures of 20th-century American realism. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn about the work of these two father and son artists, their lives and creative abilities through more than 60 works loaned from public institutions and private collections, some of them never previously exhibited in public.

Edvard Munch. Archetypes

From 06 October 2015 to 17 January 2016
http://www.museothyssen.org

The exhibition will examine Edvard Much’s long and prolific career through eighty works by the painter, half of them from the collection of the Munch Museet. Structured by themes, it will explore the representation of the human figure in various settings: the coast, the patient’s room, the abyss, the green room, the forest, night, the artist’s studio… In order to show the radical nature of his artistic language, the exhibition will study the interplay between flat and sinuous forms, the ambiguity of opposites, symbolic colour, the expressive deformation of the body and the use of experimental textures and engraving techniques. Edvard Munch. Archetypes will ultimately analyse the artistic strategies used by the painter to orient space towards a psychic dimension and convert his compositions into a lasting truth that symbolises the human condition.

Zurbarán. A New Perspective

From 09 June to 13 September 2015
http://www.museothyssen.org

The exhibition Zurbarán. A New Perspective, to be held at the Museum in the summer of 2015, will offer visitors a carefully chosen survey of the artist’s output, from his earliest commissions to key works from his mature period.

The result will be a new vision of this Spanish Golden Age painter from Extremadura through the presence of previously unexhibited canvases or ones recently rediscovered over the past few years and not previously seen in Spain.

A contemporary of Velázquez, Zurbarán’s realistic but mystical vision and his unique manner of approaching his subject matter has made him a key artist whose importance was recognised by modern art trends of the 20th century.

The exhibition will juxtapose his work with that of his most talented pupils, the latter shown together in one gallery, and with that of his son Juan de Zurbarán, represented by his sophisticated still lifes.

Mythological compositions and portraits complete the extensive representation of religious works in the seven galleries of the exhibition, which is jointly curated by Odile Delenda, art historian and specialist in Zurbarán, and Mar Borobia, Head of Old Master Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Paul Delvaux: a walk with love and death

From 24 February to 07 June 2015
http://www.museothyssen.org

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum presents an exhibition devoted to Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), an artist represented in both the Museum’s permanent collection (Woman in the Mirror, 1936) and the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (The Viaduct, 1963). After an initial stage marked by Flemish Expressionism, Delvaux discovered Surrealism and experienced the influence of Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. Delvaux’s world has an unmistakeable dreamlike quality. His female figures wander like sleepwalkers through nocturnal scenarios, displaying to the viewer their nudity, cold and sensual at the same time. Conducted in conjunction with the Musée d’Ixelles, this exhibition brings together over fifty works by the painter, coming from public and private collections in Belgium, especially the Ghêne collection. The exhibition covers five great themes in Delvaux’s iconography: Eros and Thanatos; the reclining Venus; the obsession with the Double; classical architecture and train stations; and finally, the Dance of Death.

American Impressionism

4th November 2014 - 1st February 2015
www.museothyssen.org

Following the exhibition of French Impressionism organised by the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in New York in 1886, American artists began to deploy the new brushstroke, brilliant colours and fleeting effects characteristic of the French movement, and many of these artists decided go to Paris in order to become acquainted with it at first hand. Organised by the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny and the Terra Foundation for American Art, in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, this exhibition will be the first in Spain to focus on the spread of Impressionism in the USA. Its curator, Katherine Bourguignon, curator of the Terra Foundation for American Art Europe, will make use of the approximately 60 paintings in the exhibition to analyse the way in which American artists discovered Impressionism in the 1880s and 1890s and the particular interpretation of this style that they developed around 1900. With financial support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition will first be shown at Musée des Impresionnismes Giverny in the spring of 2014, then at the National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh) in the summer, and from November at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Hubert de Givenchy

22 October 2014 - 18 January 2015 
http://www.museothyssen.org

This exhibition, the first major retrospective to be devoted to Hubert de Givenchy and the Museum’s first incursion into the world of fashion, will present a selection of the finest creations by the French fashion designer.

Curated by Hubert de Givenchy himself, it will thus offer a unique focus on his collections over the past half century, from the founding of Maison Givenchy in Paris in 1952 to his retirement in 1996.

On display will be dresses that he designed for some of the 20th century’s most iconic personalities, including Jacqueline Kennedy, the Duchess of Windsor, Caroline of Monaco and his muse and friend Audrey Hepburn (whom he dressed for films such as Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s); examples of Givenchy’s most original creations such as the “Bettina blouse” and the “sack dress”; and his admired prêt-à-porter designs, a concept he invented in 1954. These creations will be shown alongside a group of works of different periods and styles from the Museo Thyssen’s collections.

Cezanne

www.museothyssen.org
4th February 2014 - 18th May 2014

The first exhibition of 2014 will be devoted to a key figure in painting of the second half of the 19thcentury: Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), considered to be the father of modern art. Curated by the Museum’s Artistic Director, Guillermo Solana, this is the first monographic exhibition on the artist to be organised in Spain in the last thirty years. It will explore the relationship between two genres to which Cézanne devoted an equally intense focus: landscapes and still life. Like the Impressionists, Cézanne painted his landscapes outdoors but there is no sign of the seasons of the year or times of day in them and the motifs from the natural world are arranged in the manner of a stage set. In contrast, in his still lifes, the artist included the changes and dynamics characteristic of nature, with objects that normally convey stability leaning against each other in a precarious equilibrium.

Surrealism

8th October 2013 - 12th January 2014
www.museothyssen.org

Surrealism was not just another artistic movement but an attitude to life that has left a profound mark on all subsequent artistic creation. For the first time this exhibition will reveal how this transformation of modern sensibility had its roots in the profound connection between dream and image in Surrealism. Paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and photographs by artists such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, André Masson, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Claude Cahun and Paul Nougé will be used to construct an overview of this fascinating relationship proposed by the curator José Jiménez, to which little attention has been given in art-historical studies. From the outset, the Surrealists championed the dream together with automatic writing, seeing them as fundamental routes towards the liberation of the psyche. While Freud’s thinking, in particular his great work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), was crucial for the Surrealists’ own approach to the world of dreams, they were more than mere followers of his ideas. For them, the dream was a field of experience different to that of conscious life, and knowledge of it was essential for the enrichment and expansion of the psyche.

Reflections. From Van Eyck to Magritte

11th June 2013 - 15th September 2013
Thyssen - Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain)

The depiction of reflections on the surfaces of objects within a painting is a recurring motif in painting and one that fascinated numerous artists from the 15th century onwards due to its pictorial potential. The interplay between the real and the reflected image is now the chosen subject for a new installation of works from the Museum’s Permanent Collection, in which Old and Modern Masters are juxtaposed in the same space. In this new edition of <exchanging gazes> artists of different periods reveal their technical mastery by using metals, glass and mirrors to reflect details outside the pictorial space or hidden within the scene. On occasions they even offer a display of artistic narcissism by using this device to depict themselves painting behind their easels. The visual game becomes fully evident in this new installation, encouraging the viewer to raise questions about what is reality and what is reflection in each painting

Pissarro

4th June 2013 - 15th September 2013
Thyssen - Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain)

In the summer of 2013 the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting the first monographic exhibition in Spain on the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). A key figure within Impressionism (he wrote the movement’s foundational letter and was the only one of its artists to take part in all eight Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 to 1886), Pissarro was nonetheless eclipsed by the enormous popularity of his friends and colleagues, in particular Claude Monet. The exhibition includes more than 70 works with the aim of restoring Pissarro’s reputation and presenting him as one of the great pioneers of modern art. Landscape, the genre that prevailed in his output, will be the principal focus of this exhibition, which offers a chronologically structured tour of the places where the artist lived and painted: Louveciennes, Pontoise and Éragny, as well as cities such as Paris, London, Rouen, Dieppe and Le Havre. While Pissarro is traditionally associated with the rural world, to which he devoted more than three decades of his career, at the end of his life he shifted his attention to the city and his late output is dominated by urban views. Curated by Guillermo Solana, this exhibition will subsequently be shown at the CaixaForum, Barcelona.

Hyperrealism 1967-2012

22.03. - 09.06.2013
http://www.museothyssen.org

The late 1960s saw the emergence of a group of artists in the USA who painted objects and scenes from daily life with a high degree of realism, using photography as the basis for their works. This new movement achieved international recognition when it participated in the Kassel Documenta of 1972. The present exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza offers the first survey of Hyperrealism, from the great US masters of the first generation such as Richard Estes, John Baeder, Robert Bechtle, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close and Robert Cottingham, the movement’s continuation in Europe and its impact on painters of subsequent generations up to the present day. Hyperrealism is not a closed movement and today, more than forty years after it first appeared, many of the group’s pioneers continue to be active, together with new artists who deploy a photo-realist technique in their works. The artistic resources and motifs have evolved and changed over time but Hyperrealist works, with their astonishing definition, precision and detail, continue to fascinate the public.

The present exhibition brings together 66 works by three generations of artists, loaned from numerous museums and private collections. It has been organised by the Institut fur Kulturaustausch (German Cultural Exchange Institute) and is curated by its director Otto Letze. The Kunsthalle in Tubingen has been the first venue to present the exhibition, which will travel to various European cities. It can be seen at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid until 9 June, followed by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (UK). The exhibition’s principal aim is to offer visitors a complete survey of the contribution made by Hyperrealism to the history of art and this is the first exhibition on the subject of this scale to be seen in Europe, offering an unprecedented chance to see a large group of works representative of this movement as a whole.