The origins of a collection
In July 2001 Josep M. Subirachs and the Caixa Penedès Foundation signed an agreement protocol according to which the said foundation undertook to provide and finance a suitable environment for the artist's work to be exhibited to the public permanently and indefinitely. Subirachs' relationship with the sponsoring entity began with the donation of a considerable number of works from the artist's private collection. Drawings, sculptures, paintings, graphic work (lithographs and prints) , posters and medals will constitute, thus, the permanent collection of the future Centre Cultural Caixa Penedès Espai Subirachs (CCCPES).
Far from the nineteenth-century conception of cumulative exhibitions, the aim is to display a selective exhibit enabling optimum viewing and establishing a relationship between the work and the spectator. For this reason, the pieces selected relate to a proposed reading that aims to facilitate knowledge, study and an understanding of the creative contribution of Subirachs whilst, at the same time, trying to help the viewer to understand the stylistic rhythms of a lifetime dedicated to art. In this respect what is proposed is a comprehensive discourse that should provide sufficient information on the different creative phases of the artist and which shall disclose the constant themes that characterize his career, in thematic, formal or technical terms.
The museum project will be articulated from this base, in an entertaining and attractive manner, revealing the uniqueness of each work, emphasizing both the aesthetic values contained therein and the context in which they were conceived. Thus, the works exhibited will include early works in which the noucentista influence can still be seen, right up to the works of metaphysical conception from his last stage.
The CCCPES permanent collection will also include several pieces from the expressionist phase, the majority carried out during his stay in Belgium (1954-1956). There will be a broad representation of his experimentation with abstract language, exhibiting anthological works from the "penetrations and tensions" stage, when intertwined wedges and tascons and iron straps and spirals became his most commonly used plastic elements. The museum's discourse will continue with a selection of pieces that show how, from 1965, the artist set out to endow his work with more communicative elements and how, with this objective, he chose a new figuration. This was not a representative figuration, but of a signifying figuration characterized by the introduction of plastic resources such as continuous profiles, moldings, turned shapes, and classic elements such as vaulted niches, capitals, caryatids and balustrades, and, as of the early seventies, the introduction of pictorial fragments of realist technique. This is also the phase in which Subirachs consolidated the analysis of dualities and oppositions - horizontal and vertical, positive and negative, masculine and feminine, space and time, life and death -, at the same time that he was adding a series of symbolic elements that comprise the iconographic universe that uniquely define him.
Alongside almost one hundred sculptures, 75 drawings will be displayed from the different phases mentioned above, as well as a selection of 50 paintings created from 2004, when Subirachs began to notice that the strength he required to perform sculptures was diminishing. Finally, the permanent collection of the CCCPES will exhibit other well-known facets of the artist: graphic work (prints, lithographs and posters) and medals.
