Green light to the exhibition paying tribute to the Granada painter, José Guerrero, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The exhibition paying tribute to the Granada painter José Guerrero (Granada, 1914-Barcelona, 1991) has been given the go-ahead. This morning, the Director of the Council of the Alhambra and Generalife, María del Mar Villafranca and the President of the Provincial Council of Granada, Sebastián Pérez, signed a collaboration agreement in relation to the exhibition project “José Guerrero. The presence of black 1950-1966”, which commemorates the centenary of this universal painter and will be one of the main activities in the “Año Guerrero” centenary year celebrations.
The exhibition will offer an in-depth immersion into the artist’s American period thanks to which visitors will discover some “surprising” aspects of his work. These include a selection of the engravings he made in the Atelier of William Hayter in New York in the early 1950s or his portable frescoes, which reveal a painter that was ‘very interested’ in the possibilities of integrating painting into architecture.
Jointly organized by the Council of the Alhambra and Generalife and the Provincial Council of Granada, the exhibition will be inaugurated on 17th October and will run until 6th January 2015. It will be held on two sites: the Centro Guerrero and the chapel and adjoining room of the Palace of Charles V inside the precinct of the Alhambra and Generalife. Later the exhibition will be travelling to the Casa de las Alhajas (Caja Madrid Foundation) in Madrid from January to April 2015 and to the Suñol Foundation in Barcelona from May to September 2015.
The exhibition is comprised of 117 works of art by José Guerrero, of which 39 are canvases, 55 drawings, 17 engravings and 6 mixed media works on panel, belonging to different collections in Spain and abroad. A total of 68 works will be on display in the José Guerrero Centre, while the other 49 can be seen in the Palace of Charles V.
The exhibition traces three chapters in Guerrero’s life: from 1950 to 1955, a transition period in which the artist abandoned figurative language and formal and technical experimentation; from 1956 to 1962 in which Guerrero became fully integrated into the second generation of Abstract Expressionism and from 1963 to 1966 in which he rediscovered his Spanish origins as can be seen in the names of some of his paintings from the period.
In the presentation to mark the signing of the collaboration agreement, the Director of the Council of the Alhambra and Generalife, María del Mar Villafranca, urged new generations to discover José Guerrero “because he expresses what Granada has to offer and combines the value of art, a universal art like Granada and like José Guerrero himself”.
For his part, Sebastián Pérez, the President of the Provincial Council of Granada explained that the exhibition has been organized with “heart and vision” in that it reaches beyond the venues in which it will be shown in Granada to travel to Madrid and Barcelona.
In his opinion, black does not always bring darkness and that the works by Guerrero chosen for the exhibition maintain the artist’s “spirit of light”. He said that even 23 years after his death, Guerrero must continue to represent “avant-garde and strength” into the future.