Exhibition "Francesc d'Assís Galí: Exile and escape"
- Title:
- Exhibition "Francesc d'Assís Galí: Exile and escape"
- When:
- Sat, 30. November 2024 - Sun, 13. July 2025
- Category:
- Exposició Temporal Actual EN
Description
From November 30, 2024 to July 13, 2025
Opennig, Sathurday, November, 30, at 12pm
Curated by Albert Mercadé and artistic curatorship by Artur Muñoz (Coltell estudi)
This exhibition is a project organized by the Exile Memorial Museum (MUME) in collaboration with the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), which in 2025 will organize an exhibition dedicated to the same artist with the title "Francesc d'A. Galí. The invisible master" (Francesc d'A. Galí. El mestre invisible). This exhibition will take place in the Sala de la Cúpula and in rooms 63 and 64 of Modern Art of the MNAC between May 9 and September 14, 2025.
Francesc d'Assís Galí i Fabra (Barcelona, 1880-1965) was a painter, draftsman and pedagogue, linked to the noucentista movement. He studied at the Escola de Llotja and was a disciple of Alexandre de Riquer in the technique of water. His painting was a modernist principle, passed through the phases of symbolism and reality, until with the legend of modernism he changed with new ideas with some idealism.
He also dedicated himself to teaching, founding in 1906 a school in Barcelona against traditional education, the Galí School of Art, and among other artists, his students were Esteve Monegal, Manuel Humbert, Ignasi Mallol, Joan Miró, Josep Llorens i Artigas, Rafael Benet, Ernest Maragall, Marian Espinal or Lluís Plandiura.
Among his paintings, we can highlight the frescoes of the Barcelona Post Office building from 1928, those on the dome of the Palau Nacional made with the motive of the Universal Exhibition of 1929 and the paintings of the Sala del Quixot in the Casa de la Ciutat de Barcelona in 1958.
He was appointed by the Generalitat as one of the members of Fine Arts on the Council of the New Unified School; he was linked to it from its foundation until July 1937, when it was proposed to reduce the number of unions in governing bodies. Despite the short time that Galí was at the CENU, he was responsible for the artistic education curriculum. During the War he held the position of General Director of Fine Arts of the Republic, at which time the operation to safeguard the most important artistic heritage in recent history was carried out, sheltering more than three thousand works of 'art, among which was the Prado, which were evacuated to Switzerland, in a heroic and little-known episode, passing through Valencia, Barcelona and the Empordà (Figueres, Peralada and La Vajol).
His exile in London between 1939 and 1949 will decisively transform his way of understanding art and the world. Galí was a vocational, multifaceted and humanist artist, with works that are now part of the history of modern Catalan art, such as the murals of the Palau Nacional de Catalunya or the posters for the 1929's Barcelona International Exhibition.