Guillermo Peñalver

For the past eight years, Museo ABC and Fundación Banco Santander have supported Contemporary Art with the program Conexiones. Artists linked to drawing are invited to develop a specific project for the Museum revealing the connections between two works chosen from the collections of Colección Banco Santander and Colección ABC. They face the challenge —based on their choice and with absolute creative freedom— to reveal the connections that give name to the program.

Guillermo Peñalver (Tarragona, 1982) always takes his own biography as the engine of his artistic work and in this exhibition he invites us to his studio, where his professional and private lives merge. This self-portrait is consolidated in the series he has developed for the XVII Edition of the Conexiones program, in which he has been working for the last two years.

The tours that can be done inside this exhibition are rich, exquisite and didactic. We start by the pieces selected by the artist from the Colección Banco Santander (Julio Le Parc, Modulación nº 66, 1976) and the Museo ABC (where he has chosen three works: Emilio Ferrer, Brígida y su boda, 1929; Ángel Díaz Huertas, El niño y el escaparate, 1924 and Antonio Barbero, El hombre mañoso, 1932). We continue by his private collection of white objects and we can finish by the drawings he has made for this exhibition.

Peñalver has a singular way to approach the art of drawing. He can execute beautiful examples of traditional technique of graphite or colored pencils on paper, but he can also make amazing collages of cut out papers. These works are remarkable because of the richness of papers and cardboards used, the artist plays with their textures, transparencies, brightness, thicknesses or contrasts. He performs a difficult exercise where the different tones of white of the different papers results in the subtle main resource. It is barely visible, but the visitor’s patient look will discover lots of unsuspected nuances.

GALLERY TALKS WITH THE ARTIST
Guillermo Peñalver will guide two tours to his exhibition on September 11th and 27th at 6.30 p.m.
Free access until the group is completed.