Catalogue ‘Marina Vargas Revelations’.

Edición en español con apéndice de textos en inglés

Format: 165 x 240 mm (W x H)

128 pages

Softcover binding

ISBN: 978-84-17173-98-2

Authors: Semíramis González and Marina Vargas

The Kora programme, which each year presents an exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza dedicated to a living Spanish artist, celebrates its eighth edition with the exhibition Revelaciones de la artista Marina Vargas (Revelations by the artist Marina Vargas). The title alludes at the same time to the manifestation of the sacred and the unveiling of what has always been hidden and silenced: the figures and voices of women. Revelaciones is both an unprecedented exhibition and an extension of the great themes - the great obsessions - of Vargas's work, and of her intense neo-baroque aesthetic, expressed in a rich variety of media.

The exhibition and what is exhibited in this catalogue is not a mere gathering of independent works of art, but a total creation in which space and colour, paintings and sculptures, objects and words are integrated, and where the artist incorporates the pieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection that she has chosen, such as Hans Cranach's Hercules at the Court of Omphale, Petrus Christus's The Virgin of the Dry Tree or the Angels of the Angels.

pieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection that she has chosen, such as Hans Cranach's Hercules at the Court of Omphale, Petrus Christus's Virgin of the Dry Tree and Della Robbia's Adoring Angels. Each space surprises us with its own symbolic language. In the first part, devoted to the ‘Word’, are the phrases in sign language, taken from sources as diverse as the apocryphal Gospel of Mary Magdalene and modern-day feminist slogans.

In the second part, on the ‘Vision’, the ceramic crabs descend the wall and allude to the cancer that the artist lived through and which determined her creation. In the third part, on the ‘Body’, are the two inverted Pietàs - Jesus holding his Mother: the black Pietà hanging from the ceiling and the cracked Pietà on the floor. The last part, the black room, is dominated by the magnificent sculpture of Santa María Egipcíaca, by Luis Salvador Carmona, on loan from the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid.

Sculpture in Valladolid, surrounded by the drawings of the tarot arcana, which have been setting the rhythm of the exhibition and are now brought together as if in a litany.