VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
In this 2019 in which we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the IVAM, the artist around whom the story of the museum developed could not be missing as a guest, Julio González. As a key figure in the center, we have more than looked at it, that's why matter, space and time has looked for added value in context, telling us chronologically of González's connections with other avant-garde artists and movements of his time. The first room shows his first works of goldsmithing, and in the second (years 10) we see that he has already learned to weld, which allows him to greatly lighten the sculpture and favors a collaboration with Pablo Picasso: the engraving Woman's head. In the third room (years 20) develops the void in the sculpture and plays with light and shadow, matter and space, with Kurt Schwitters and Joaquín Torres-García. In the years 30 his work becomes more complex in symbolic elements and depth and continues to cultivate the tension between figuration and abstraction, Besides, the latter becomes more organic (he never wanted to be completely abstract). The last area of the tour focuses on the Pavilion of the Republic of the Universal Exhibition of Paris 1937. we can see The Montserrat by Julio González representing with his desperate gesture the suffering of the Spanish people during the Civil War and the sculpture Face the mirror, one of his masterpieces, two works of opposite styles made by the same hand, that of an artist who traveled the avant-garde in a very personal way, without marrying anyone (not surrealism, nor cubism, nor constructivism), but drinking here and there. S.M.
