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GERARDO RUEDAMadrid-Paris-Madrid January 21 – March 14, 2004Opening Wednesday January 21, 6-8pmSubsequently the exhibition will travel to other American museums.
‘Spanish Art for the Exterior’ is a cultural programme introduced in 2002 by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of Cultural and Scientific Relations, coinciding with Spain presiding the European Community. The programme is part of Spain’s universal commitment and a continuation of its Spanish Contemporary Art Promotion Project abroad. The programme, a co-production with the State Agency for Cultural Activities Abroad, (SEACEX), now offers a new exhibition, Gerardo Rueda, one of the greatest ‘constructivists’ of Spain’s vanguard artistic panorama. The exhibition is managed by Barbara Rose, one of the best specialists in Spanish Minimalist Art, and incorporates sixty-seven of the author’s works amongst which there are oil paintings, sculptures, collages, frames, drawings and matches. Gerardo Rueda was born in 1926 in Madrid and at the age of seventeen, influenced by the work of cubist artists, especially Juan Gris, started producing reproductions, landscapes and drawings in small format. However, leaving aside the area of still life, he turned to architecture as his main objective developing his perspective as well as his figures. His taste for reductionism and simplification lead him to transform these architectural figures into geometric volumes, combining flat surfaces with perspectives, giving enormous depth to his work. He is currently participating in his first collective exhibition in the ‘Revista de Occidente’ gallery in Madrid. During the Fifties’ decade, inspired by the factory buildings surrounding the family owned tanning business, he produced paintings with very visible brush-strokes although limiting his palette to a scale of grays – something which he maintained until he come into contact with Nicolas de Staël, and subsequently used in his last reliefs. It is then when he created his ‘sandwiches’, art pieces produced with paper and collages which he executed during the factory lunch breaks – an arrangement of individual blocks of colour; coloured rectangles treated in an architectural fashion? Towards the end of that decade and after his visit to Paris, in his work Rueda develops calligraphies and improvisations projecting his interest for the pictorial process and its materials. He meets Nicolas de Staël, and since then, he begins to apply thick coats of oil paint with a spatula giving rise to the large reliefs characteristic of his monochromatic paintings of the sixties. These are abstract landscapes in which he separates the individual planes made up of brilliant colours and which in 1959 he suddenly substitutes with a palette of grays and browns in paintings where the objects are reduced to a few elements appearing to be structured in a rigorous fashion. Rueda exhibits these monochromatic art pieces at the Bienal in Venice in 1960. During his visits to Paris he also meets Fernando Zóbel, whose desire to create a museum of abstract art in Spain, takes them to Cuenca towards the beginning of the sixties where Rueda is influenced by the city’s bright colours, the volumes and contrasts between the light and the shadows and it is here that he moves on from painting over canvas to using wood, incorporating these volumes and even integrating the shadows produced by them. He also produced tri-dimensional collages which included architectural elements or matchboxes and cigarette packets establishing a game between the canvas and the frame. Throughout his life, besides his pictorial work, Rueda produced geometric sculptures, which, from small-scale models he transformed into architectural scales, at the same time producing numerous paintings and relief murals. His graphic work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions throughout Spain as well as abroad and from 1992 to the present day, his son, José Luis Rueda, has managed all the projects relating to the artist. Gerardo Rueda died in 1996 and his work has been exhibited in numerous retrospectives such as those organized by the National Art Center ‘Reina Sofía Museum’ in 1997 and 2001. As part of the ‘Spanish Art for the Exterior’ programme, this exhibition was inaugurated in the Amos Anderson museum in Helsinki and in the PMMK museum in Ostende, Belgium. After its stay in New York the exhibition will continue its course to other American cities.
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