The exhibition showcases over a hundred works by the artist
The TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes museum collaborates with the Museo Picasso Málaga in a retrospective dedicated to the painter Óscar Domínguez (Tenerife, 1906 – Paris, 1957), which can now be visited at the Malaga museum from this Friday. The exhibition showcases over a hundred works by the artist, one of the protagonists of the surrealist avant-garde of the 1930s.
Curated by the curator of the TEA Collection, Isidro Hernández Gutiérrez, Óscar Domínguez brings together a collection of masterpieces by the artist until October 13. It is a retrospective exhibition that accounts for the painter’s trajectory through his different periods, as specified by the Cabildo in a note.
In this way, special attention is paid to the surrealist period of the thirties – considered the best moment of his production – showcasing several of his most emblematic works.
In addition to the works loaned by the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes museum, including several very significant pieces such as La bola roja (1933), Le dimanche (1935), Los sifones (1938), or the Autorretrato con Cabeza de toro (1941), the exhibition features works from various public institutions, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) in Madrid, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, and the ABANCA Gallera Foundation.
Also, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM), the Telefónica Foundation, the CajaCanarias Foundation, the Mapfre Foundation, the LM Collection of La Laguna (Tenerife), the María José Jove Foundation (A Coruña), and the Government of the Canary Islands Collection.
MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Additionally, the exhibition includes several loans from international institutions, such as the Cantini Museum in Marseille, which collaborates with the temporary loan of a previously unpublished work by the painter, dated 1940, La solitude, a former collection of the poet Paul Éluard.
Another key work in the exhibition is the Máquina de coser electrosexual, from the Heine Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, considered the artist’s masterpiece, in which, according to the exhibition’s curator, the painter seeks to «dynamite the conventional and orthodox aspects of desire and sexuality in favor of excessive and ritualistic eroticism.»
«The creations of Domínguez from the thirties seek to give meaning to the exercise of creative freedom, understanding art and life as a single impulse in which chance, desire, dark humor, and the irrational come together,» he pointed out.
Other private collections, mainly from Spain and France, have collaborated in this important retrospective of the painter, as well as several pieces from the Madrid galleries Leandro Navarro, Guillermo de Osma, or the Parisian Applicat-Prazan.
ABOUT ÓSCAR DOMÍNGUEZ
The work of Óscar Domínguez is nourished by an iconography linked to his youth in the north of Tenerife, where he gestates an irrational and overabundant conception of the enigmatic processes of metamorphosis that will accompany his work throughout his career.
A visionary painter and magnificent constructor of symbolically functioning objects, Domínguez was included in the Dictionary of Surrealism (1937) as the inventor of the decalcomania technique, one of the highest expressions of the impulse of imaginative play.
In addition, the imagery of his painting, closely linked to the nature of the Canary Islands and the imagery of the material culture of the aboriginal Canaries, shapes a very unique painting, loaded with mythical and symbolic elements that differentiate him from other surrealists.
According to the director of the Museo Picasso Málaga, Miguel López-Remiro Forcada, «few artists embody the scope and significance of surrealism with as much intensity as Óscar Domínguez.» «With this exhibition,» he asserts, «the Malaga museum reaffirms its commitment to showcasing artists and artistic expressions contemporary to Picasso, his era, and his context.»
