The Maricel Museum revives the memory of the Charles Deering Collection with an exhibition that returns great names of Catalan art to their original space

This Thursday, April 30 at 7 p.m., the Maricel Museum will host the inaugural conference of the exhibition 'Absences and Presences. Charles Deering's Artists in the Banc Sabadell Art Collection', given by the exhibition's curator, Sebastià Sánchez Sauleda, and art historian Patxi Ocio Casamartina. The session, which will take place in the Gothic Hall, will include a musical performance with pieces inspired by the inauguration of the Maricel Palace, evoking the cultural context of that time. Afterwards, and until 9 p.m., the public will be able to visit the exhibition for free. The activity is free to enter, with limited capacity. The conference will provide an in-depth look at the figure of Charles Deering, the American industrialist and collector who promoted the creation of Maricel to house an ambitious collection of Hispanic art, as well as the role of the contemporary artists who were part of it.

The exhibition, which can be visited from 2 May to 25 October 2026, proposes to revisit and reactivate a fundamental part of the artistic memory of the Maricel ensemble. The show brings together a total of 26 works from the Banc Sabadell Art Collection, which allow us to symbolically reconstruct the legacy of Catalan and Spanish artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries linked to the Deering Collection. The show proposes an exercise in return: the works once again occupy the spaces of Maricel, reactivating the story of a key moment in the construction of Sitges' artistic heritage and its cultural projection.

The group of artists represented includes some of the most prominent names in Catalan and Spanish modern art, such as Santiago Rusiñol, Ramon Casas, Joaquim Mir, Hermenegild Anglada-Camarasa, Joaquim Sunyer, Eliseu Meifrèn, Arcadi Mas i Fondevila, Joan Roig i Soler, Oleguer Junyent, Joan Llaverias, Enric Casanovas and Ricard Canals, as well as other relevant figures such as Mariano Andreu, Xavier Nogués, Darío de Regoyos, Josep Maria Sert, Ramón de Zubiaurre, Rafael Durancamps and Jaume Mercadé. This plurality of authors allows us to offer a rich and diverse vision of the artistic languages ​​of the moment, from luminist landscapes to portraiture, including sculpture and works on paper.

The exhibition proposal also incorporates a dialogue with 17 historical images of the Maricel complex, generating a relationship between past and present that allows us to rethink the museum beyond its heritage dimension and activate it as a living space of meaning.

In the area of ​​accessibility, the exhibition incorporates four works with audio description —by Santiago Rusiñol, Joan Roig i Soler, Hermenegild Anglada-Camarasa and Ramón de Zubiaurre— which offer a more sensory and inclusive approach to the works. This is the third exhibition of the Sitges Museums to incorporate this resource, consolidating a line of work aimed at expanding access to culture and diversifying audiences. With this exhibition, the Sitges Museums reinforce their role as a reference institution in the reinterpretation of heritage and in the construction of new cultural stories based on their own history.

More information about this exhibition in the exhibitions section, by clicking here.