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Opera Gallery moves to Madrid
Inauguration of the new space with the exhibition Loving Picasso, 12 May - 11 June 2023, Madrid.
Opera Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new gallery in Spain, in Madrid, next May. Located at 56 Calle Serrano in the lively Salamanca district, the space was designed by Hernàndez Arquitectos, an architectural firm known for its use of raw materials to create warm and elegant interiors. With a monumental spiral staircase at its center, the gallery covers some 1,000 square meters on three floors and is divided into seven rooms with ceiling heights exceeding 4 meters that will easily accommodate Opera Gallery's collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces. Belén Herrera Ottino, with a solid background in the art market, including twenty years with the Marlborough Gallery, has been chosen to head Opera Gallery Madrid.
An exhibition entitled Loving Picasso, open from May 12 to June 11 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the artist's death, will inaugurate the gallery and will feature works by major artists of the 20th and 21st centuries who were inspired, influenced or touched in some way by Picasso.
The exhibition will feature works by such great artists as Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, Niki de Saint Phalle, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, George Condo and Fernando Botero. A group of outstanding Spanish artists, including Joan Miró, Antonio Saura, Manolo Valdés, Miquel Barceló, Lita Cabellut and Xavier Mascaró, will complete the selection exhibited on this occasion.
"Picasso's influence on the artistic creation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is undeniable, whether expressed in an obvious or more subtle way. The artists exhibited in Loving Picasso, whether they were contemporaries of the Andalusian artist or belong to younger generations, are all intrinsically linked to Picasso," observes Belén Herrera.
As Guillermo Solana, director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, explains in the exhibition's catalog: "The history of 20th-century art could be written through a series of tributes to Picasso, whether public or private, overtly declared or more secret - some of the most sincere of them coming from Spanish or Spanish-speaking artists. Antonio Saura, for example, appropriates a photo of Picasso by masking it, while Manolo Valdés revisits the old masters through the Picasso prism, and Fernando Botero offers us a full-length portrait of the genius from Malaga inspired by a photo by Brassaï."
