MEMORIES 140 YEARS

“Tota augusta de tradició com apareixia en els darrers temps, la Sala Parés havia estat escenari d’inquietuds i de novetats i d’atreviments. Ara tornarà a ésser-ho.”

Josep Ma Junoy, 1925.1

The fact that an art gallery in Barcelona turns 140 years of permanent activity is remarkable, especially in the context of the year 2017.

It is for this reason that we have organized this exhibition as a recognition to many artists, buyers, collectors, art critics, institutions, individuals and human teams that made it possible.

We have called it, “Memory,” because we wanted to focus only on the first 110 years of Sala Parés, from, 1877 when it opened, until 1988. This is the time when the gallery incorporates artists of a different sign, it makes an important architectural remodeling and a generational transition takes place in its direction. What happened later we believe that it needs more time to be analyzed with perspective.

We have chosen works by some of the most representative artists of the gallery in each of the three stages of this period of more than a century: the first, from 1877, founding year, until 1889; The second one, which covers from 1890 – when the first individual exhibitions started on a regular basis, and the first Rusiñol, Casas i Clarasó group – until 1925, when Mr. Joan Baptista Parés transferred the gallery to Joan Anton Maragall Noble; and finally the third stage, which began in 1925 when the brothers Joan Anton and Raimon Maragall placed Sala Parés in a new artistic line and a new way of understanding the gallery.

All the authors represented in this exhibition have, at some point, been artists of the gallery; It must be said that, for reasons of space, there are not all the names that have been important in the first 110 years of Sala Parés.

Finally, we wanted almost all the works to be on sale, because we believe that this is a fundamental feature of the work of an art gallery. The present Sala Parés has a very different sign than shown in this exhibition, as it has both artists working on contemporary figuration and realism, as well as some who do it in abstraction, or others that They are expressed in disciplines such as photography, installation or video art. In addition, the gallery has gone on to act in a global geographical area. This evolution has a “stamp” that has been constant in the trajectory of Sala Parés: the permanent renovation of an artistic proposal in which some of the essential values ​​of art coexist, such as the concept, lace and visual beauty.

Joan Anton Maragall