Press Release

The Embassy of Spain, ICO Foundation, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and the National Art Museum of China, present the exhibition From Picasso to Barceló: Spanish Sculpture of the 20th Century. The collection features works by great Spanish masters of last century, such as Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Gris, Gaudí, Barceló, Chillida, Tapies, Oteiza, Palazuelo, Muñoz, Solano, among many others.

This exhibition shows the development of Spanish sculpture throughout the twentieth century from the aesthetic breakaway of the first avant-garde trends to the present day, but it also takes a look at the links between drawing and sculpture, tracing the path followed from the emergence of an idea to its conversion into a three-dimensional object.

The chosen works are examples of the reformulation of sculpture based on avant-garde ideas that marked a shift away from traditional principles and procedures centred on three-dimensionality to a modern art in which works can lose their volume, their solidity, their mass. Sculpture also espoused the ideas of abstract painting, giving rise to a huge testing ground; over time and with the most recent techniques, this experimentation embraced fields such as installations and videos, enriching the finite form of the sculpture.