New Acquisitions for New Stories 2025.1

NEW ACQUISITIONS FOR NEW NARRATIVES 2025.1

Presentation

The Sitges Museums present New Acquisitions for New Narratives 2025.1, a small-format exhibition that focuses on a group of works recently added to the public collections. Beyond their individual value, these works allow for a critical re-examination of the narratives that have shaped the history of art.

Through paintings, prints, posters, and objects related to material culture, the exhibition traces a journey from the mid-19th century to the second half of the 20th century. The selected pieces highlight both the criteria for artistic legitimation at each stage and the absences, silences, and hierarchies that these criteria have generated.

Far from offering a chronological or stylistic interpretation, the exhibition proposes an open dialogue between artists, disciplines, and diverse life contexts, inviting the public to rethink what it means today to add a work to a museum and what narratives are activated when the canon is challenged.

Narrative

The collection of works comprising New Acquisitions for New Narratives allows us to compare very different artistic trajectories and, at the same time, observe how social, gender, and class factors have profoundly shaped their reception and historical projection.

The presence of Joan Llimona, a central figure of Catalan Modernism and a symbol of a hegemonic artistic and moral model, contrasts with the rediscovery of artists such as Elisea Lluch and Amèlia Riera. Lluch, active in the mid-19th century, developed her work within a domestic environment that limited the public visibility of women artists. Her work, Biblical Figures, emerges today as a valuable testimony both for its pictorial quality and for the context of silence that has surrounded it for decades.

Amelia Riera, on the other hand, represents a later generation of women who, despite the difficulties, managed to break into the professional art scene. Informalista 2, one of his most representative paintings, displays a radically free and critical attitude, key to understanding the visual languages ​​of the second half of the 20th century.

The exhibition is completed with works by Valentín de Zubiaurre and Mariano Andreu, artists with singular trajectories that transcend normative narratives. Zubiaurre's portrait of Santiago Rusiñol, marked by his status as a deaf painter, offers a sensitive and introspective look at one of the pivotal figures of Modernism. Meanwhile, Mariano Andreu's The Bath reveals a refined graphic production and an aesthetic universe linked to the world of theater and identities that often remained outside the accepted social order.

The poster for the 5th International Art Exhibition of 1907, by Joan Llimona, serves as the conceptual axis of the exhibition. This piece, which announced the artistic acquisitions of its time, allows for a direct parallel to be drawn with current acquisition policies and questions how institutional criteria have evolved—or not—over more than a century.

Finally, the collection of dolls from the 1920s offers an interpretation based on material culture and everyday memory. These objects, seemingly far removed from high culture, contribute an essential symbolic dimension: the construction of gender roles, childhood, and social imaginaries that also form part of the museum's narrative.

Artists and Works

Elisea Lluch i Garriga (1831–1892)
Biblical Figures (c. 1851). Oil on canvas.
An exceptional work in the oeuvre of an artist who developed her career in the private sphere. The painting stands out both for its technical quality and its symbolic weight, asserting the presence of women in 19th-century painting.

Amelia Riera y Toyos (1928–2019)
Informalist 2 (c. 1960). Oil on canvas.
An emblematic painting of Catalan Informalism that synthesizes the radicalism, expressive freedom, and critical spirit of one of the most singular artists on the contemporary scene.

Valentín de Zubiaurre Aguirrezábal (1879–1963)
Portrait of Santiago Rusiñol (c. 1911–1912). Oil on canvas.
A portrait of great psychological intensity that offers an alternative perspective on a key figure of Modernism, from a sensibility marked by the artist's personal experience.

Joan Llimona i Bruguera (1860–1926)
Poster for the 5th International Art Exhibition (1907). Chromolithograph on frosted paper.
A fundamental piece for understanding the mechanisms of artistic legitimation at the beginning of the 20th century and a conceptual starting point for the exhibition's discourse.

Mariano Andrés y Extraño (1888–1976)
The Bath (1934). Lithograph on Japanese paper.
A delicate and evocative work that reflects the aesthetic universe of an artist connected to the world of theater, set design, and graphic arts.

Doll Collection (c. 1920)
Un conjunto de objetos que aporta una lectura transversal sobre la cultura de la infancia, la construcción del género y la memoria cotidiana, ampliando los límites tradicionales del relato museístico.