pinned.events

"Temps Moderns" offers a critical reassessment of the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia’s collection of contemporary Spanish painting, focusing on the period between the 1940 and 1970 decades. This timeline is essential for understanding artistic modernization in Spain after the Civil War, yet it has often been left to one side in museum narratives because it falls between classical art and the late-20th-century avant-gardes. The exhibition is built around state acquisitions made from 1968 onward under the direction of Felipe Garín, reflecting the museum’s effort to shape a narrative around Valencian artists active after the Civil War. In recent years, the core has been expanded with works by Francisco Sebastián, Juana Francés, and Aurora Valero, offering a fuller view of postwar creation. The exhibition is organized into three sections: New Figuration, Postwar Abstraction, and Landscape and Still Life. The figurative section traces a shift from expressionist approaches toward more critical proposals, especially from the 1960s onward, with groups such as Estampa Popular and Equipo Crónica adopting visual strategies linked to Pop Art. At the same time, abstraction was gradually embraced and promoted as a sign of modernity, giving rise to informalist, geometric, and optical works represented by artists such as Eusebio Sempere and José María Yturralde. The display concludes with landscape and object painting, presented as spaces for reflection on identity and society. Through formal deconstruction and expressive use of color, Valencian artists offered a critical view of a territory shaped by economic and social change.