Museo Carmen Thyssen

Over the course of its many revolutions, contemporary art demonstrated that what matters is not so much seeing as how we look. In keeping with this maxim, our exhibition invites viewers to ‘read’ a story of the Suñol Soler Collection in images through a selection of its most outstanding works, linked by elective visual affinities, to explain a specific period in twentieth-century Spanish art and its living memory preserved by businessman, lawyer and philanthropist Josep Suñol Soler (1927–2019).

Along the lines of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929) or André Malraux's Musée Imaginaire (1947) [usually translated as ‘museum without walls’ or ‘imaginary museum’]  – two key methods of thinking with images in the history of art and museums’ exhibition practice – the Archipelago we have charted here presents the Suñol Soler Collection as a visual map of Spanish artistic creation between 1960 and 1980. It focuses on the collecting interests of its owner – who was particularly sensitive to Catalan art of those years.

The collage of images taken from the eclectic ‘Suñol archipelago’ conjures up the notion of collection that underpins the works (with its preferences and absences). In it, different languages are interwoven and contrasted; international trends permeate Spanish ones; other periods (from the 1920s to the 1990s) are mixed together; the mainstream (the leading names in international and Spanish modern art of the twentieth century) coexists alongside more adventurous or less commercial approaches; and contemporary art is explored through five concepts that recurringly appear in its many artistic expressions.

These are the islands of the archipelago, which are also vectors of the collection itself: individuals and their identity crisis, nature as an inexhaustible source of creation, the distilled essences of visible forms, signs as signals of a new visual language of communication, and the primaeval matter from which everything originates. Each of them is autonomous, an exhibition in itself within the general map. But it is when they are brought together that they take on their full meaning, as a scaled-down version of Josep Suñol's collecting universe and as a map of modern Spanish art between the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of democracy, between the analogies and divergences of various approaches – abstract, figurative, experimental, conceptual, expressionist, minimalist, flat, matter based, organic, constructive...

Seventeenth-century Spain, ruled by the Habsburg monarchy, made an intense and determined effort to promote the religious art of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, whose purpose was to persuade souls through the senses in order to strengthen their faith. To achieve this, importance was attached to visual culture as a means of conveying religion, and the functions of sacred images were clearly defined: to teach, to delight and, above all, to move. Much of Spanish Baroque art was dominated by naturalism, sometimes stark. From the late 1500s onwards and throughout the following century, the appearance of reality pervaded the work of sculptors and painters such as Gregorio Fernández, Zurbarán, Martínez Montañés, Velázquez, Espinosa, Murillo, and also the Ribaltas (Francisco and Juan), whose paintings are the focus of this exhibition.

In Valencia, where Francisco Ribalta (1565–1628) produced his mature works and his son Juan (1596/1597–1628) spent the whole of his brief career (cut short by his death at barely more than thirty), the implementation of the Counter-Reformation precepts and their artistic consequences blossomed during the archbishopric of Saint Juan de Ribera (1532–1611). Under the archbishop’s guidelines, artists were encouraged to abandon the Mannerist aesthetic and embrace naturalism, particularly through themes of the Passion of Christ and images of sanctity.

The selection of ten works from the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia on display in this room provides an insight into this production of religious iconography, featuring saints and biblical scenes, in Valencian and Spanish Baroque art. Above all, it enables visitors to admire the mastery of realistic depiction imbued with intense emotion and pathos in the paintings of Francisco Ribalta and his son and pupil Juan, which contributed to stimulating the devotion and feelings of the faithful in the context of Golden Age religious fervour.

Organised by the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga in collaboration with the artist’s family as a small-scale tribute from his native city, this intimate, delicate and minimalist exhibition offers a fleeting glimpse of a little of the greatness of Franquelo’s art. The series of fourteen prints entitled The Language of Things and the two photographic prints based on the motifs featured in them not only illustrate this solitary, almost monastically ascetic and experimental work (which won him the National Printmaking Prize in 1998); they also show snippets of his studio and the insignificant objects he hoarded haphazardly and circumstantially, and with which he shaped a microcosm resembling that of a collector of moments.

Two drawings of urban landscapes of Madrid, his adoptive city, likewise illustrate how, for Franquelo, the world outside his studio doors was yet another accumulation of inert objects and forms organised in space, which could be arranged into another still life in silence and calm. And everything is executed in a breathtakingly meticulous technique that challenges the eye, pushing it to its limits.

Manuel Franquelo, Still Life with Bird, 2003
Platinum palladium photographic print on paper, 62 x 57 cm.
Courtesy of the artist. © Manuel Franquelo, VEGAP, Málaga, 2026.