Marco de Vigo contrasts Laxeiro’s work with that of other artists he admired

The Museum of Contemporary Art from Vigo, Marco, is stepping towards the last century with an exhibition that is open to the public this Thursday. With this, he wants to put the icing on the cake for the year of Laxeira decided by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which ends in April 2023. Laxeiro is the art of its time It is a self-produced exhibition curated by the director of the museum, Miguel Fernández-Cid. Despite the fact that Vigo hosts the Laxeiro Foundation on the third floor of the Casa das Artes, he assured in his presentation that holding the said exhibition in Marco “is more than justified”. He compared it to being able to see Velázquez in El Prado. Perhaps he wanted to say that the space where the entity that watches over the artistic and cultural heritage of Laxeira in Vigo is located is not the most suitable for this work, because, otherwise, why move everything and turn Marco into another FFDR Art Gallery (Francisco Fernández del Riego). It is an understatement to say that Casa das Artes was not the right place. Fernández-Cid did not say so, but the mayor of Vigo, Abel Caballero, declared that “Marco is the best place in the world for this exhibition”.

What the director and curator explained is that the exhibition — “very visual and without pretensions to set a chair, but to open up to other analyses” — proposes to see the contrasts and similarities between the works of the Lalín painter and those of other contemporaries of the artist. Thus, for the first time, a selection of his most outstanding works can be seen together with the works of artists that Laxeiro followed closely (Ignacio Zuloaga, Jesús Corredoyra, Arturo Souto, Manuel Colmeiro, Carlos Maside, Castelao, Francisco Asorey, Maruja Mallo, Luis Seoane or Joaquín Torres García ) together with Gutiérrez Solano, Vázquez Díaz, Benjamín Palencia, Joan Miró or, later, Antonio Saura, Rafael Canogar or Barcalo. And as special references, Rembrandt and Goya, present with graphic work.

Fernández-Cid added that the exhibition, which opens on February 23 and ends on July 21 — the day of the birth and death of the painter José Otero Abeled, Laxeiro (Lalín, 1908 – Vigo, 1996) — “does not end here, but it begins ; and there will be surprises.

to New York

The mayor of Vigo, for his part, announced that the exhibition will travel beyond Vigo, Spain and Europe, and stated that it was understood as a “challenge and a personal desire” to reach New York “because it must be done to transcend and leave behind the idea that if it is only ours, then it is more ours. The exhibition contains works from the collections of the Vigo City Council (Laxeiro Foundation and the Quiñones de León Museum), but also works by individuals and Galician museums and institutions and from other communities. Framework considers the works of the Fine Arts Museum to be relevant in Bilbao, as well as the Abanca and Afundación collections, the Montenegro and Artemanz galleries and “private collections conscious of preserving public treasures”.