Ninety years after the tribute exhibition that Sala Parés hosted in honour of Ricard Canals (1876-1931), the painter returns to our gallery with a new retrospective exhibition that presents a large part of his artistic evolution in a concentrated way, as well as some of his masterpieces such as Un palco en los toros (1904), Le Bar (1909-10) or the portraits of Benedetta Bianco (1870-1958), among others.
The exhibition includes a selection that shows how Canals placed Spanish folklore at the service of pictorial experimentation and plastic approaches which, despite the apparently traditional air of the themes, are always formulated in a thoroughly modern manner. It also focuses on Canals’s facet as an extraordinary draughtsman, without neglecting the success he achieved as a portraitist in Barcelona – where he settled permanently in 1906 after a long stay in Paris – and his sporadic immersion in landscape painting.
Ricard Canals (1876-1931) and his time is an exhibition that sets Canals’ work in context, proposing links and comparisons with other contemporary artists, with some of whom the painter established personal relationships and/or affinities. Other artists such as Isidre Nonell, Joaquim Sunyer, Pere Ysern Alié, Joan Cardona, Ramon Pichot and Marià Pidelasera, among many others, meet and dialogue with the work of one of the Catalan painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who achieved the greatest success in markets such as Paris and New York. This exhibition has been curated by Sergio Fuentes Milà.
