Since March 2020 the pandemic has turned all our lives upside-down and cultural events have been disrupted as well. Situations differ from country to country, so here is an overview of the exhibitions, galleries and museums where you can (or will soon be able to) discover works by Antoni Clavé.
“Antoni Clavé“, Galleria d’Arte Maggiore – Bologna
Announced for September 2020, the exhibition opened this autumn but the gallery, in respect of Italian national guidelines, was then forced to close. Happily, since the beginning of February, the Galleria d’Arte Maggiore has reopened its doors to the public, exhibiting an important selection of works by Antoni Clavé, including some historical works: a portrait from 1945, a large collage from 1959, still lifes, the “guerriers” responsible for Clavé’s fame but also more recent works from the series “Vu à New York” or large format works dating from the artist’s final years in the early 2000s. The selection is rich and varied, reaffirming the strong links between the founders of the gallery and Antoni Clavé. No end date has been announced.
“Antoni Clavé en gran format“, Galeria Joan Gaspar – Barcelona
Not a spelling mistake in this title but a title in Catalan for the exhibition of the “post-pandemic” reopening of the Joan Gaspar gallery. The gallery is showing works in a wide variety of techniques: paintings, collages, tapestry-assemblage, bronze sculptures, and paintings on aluminum, which all have one thing in common – as the title indicates – their large size. This very impressive collection allows us to tackle 40 years of creation from 1962 to 2002. To be discovered until 30 April 2021
« Small is Beautiful », Clavé Fine Art – Paris
Antoine Clavé, a young business school graduate and great-grandson of Antoni Clavé, grew up in a family of art lovers and collectors, which led to his own passion for modern and contemporary art. In March 2021, he will be opening a gallery in the space he shares with the Antoni Clavé Archives. For this inaugural exhibition, he has chosen a selection of small-format works by twelve major twentieth-century artists, including Alexander Calder, César, Eduardo Chillida, Germaine Richier and Jean Dubuffet. Naturally, the exhibition includes works by Antoni Clavé: two sculptures from the 1960s.
The exhibition can be discovered by appointment from March 11 to May 11, 2021.
“De Miró à Barceló. Un Siglo de Arte Español” Centre Pompidou Malaga
Cubism, surrealism, figuration, abstraction, painting, sculpture, cinema, video… Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Buñuel or Clavé were the precursors of new ways of seeing and creating and their legacy is still very much alive. This chronological journey, through a century of Spanish art, shows that the contemporary artists of this generation have assimilated the spirit of the avant-garde with extraordinary energy. Their predecessors lived through the vicissitudes of history, Parisian exile, war and ostracism, which nourished a vast repertoire of disturbing, radical, even sacrilegious images. The heirs – Miquel Barceló, Cristina Iglesias and La Ribot, among others – although they all grew up in freedom, continue to surprise us today with new artistic forms.
Opened in March 2020, the exhibition closed but reopened this winter. Visitors can discover “Quatre Points,” an oil and collage on canvas by Antoni Clavé on loan for the occasion from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition will be on view until 6 February 2022.
“Ex Africa“, Musée du Quai Branly – Paris
The title of the exhibition is inspired by Pliny the Elder’s quote (for the record, Pliny from the 1st century AD) “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi“: “From Africa, always something new”.
In an unprecedented visual dialogue, the exhibition brings together more than 150 works by contemporary artists of all generations and origins to decipher the relationship between contemporary art and older African art since the end of the twentieth century. For Philippe Dagen, curator of the exhibition, it was a question of putting an end to the notion of primitivism such as it was stated in 1984 in the exhibition organized at MoMa, which at the time presented non-Western art only as a foil to the European avant-garde.
In Ex Africa there are works by Annette Messager, ORLAN, Alun Be, Théo Mercier, Emo de Medeiros but also Myriam Mihindou, Kader Attia, Romuald Hazoumè or Pascale Marthine Tayou. The first room of the exhibition features a sculpture by Antoni Clavé alongside paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, A.R. Penck, James Brown and Chéri Samba. Who says Latin scholars know nothing about contemporary art? Currently closed, the exhibition was scheduled to open on 9 February and will be on view until next 27 June.