SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Jan. 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –
TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes presented this Thursday ‘Maud, c’est la vie!’, the first retrospective dedicated to the figure of Maud Bonneaud (Limoges, 1921-Madrid, 1991) as an artist and cultural agitator in order to unravel her enormous complexity and show it as a fundamental piece of cultural doing and happening.
The Councilor for Culture of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Enrique Arriaga; the insular director of Culture, Alejandro Krawietz; the artistic director of TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Gilberto González; and the exhibition’s curator, Pilar Carreño, announced the details of this exhibition that reveals the biographical profile of a polyhedral woman with multiple intellectual and artistic interests.
“Maud was a great artist, a peerless creator and an intellectual who lived by and for art but who, like many other women of her time, was overshadowed by her partners and was considered, despite being a genius, as ‘ woman of’. But she is a creator who deserves a retrospective like this one on her own merits,” said Enrique Arriaga, who anticipated that “each of the pieces that make up ‘Maud, c’est la vie!’, which are more than 300, provide keys to the life of this French artist who found her home in Tenerife”.
Throughout the exhibition, which can be visited for free from this Friday until April 27, attendees will approach “the different intellectual and artistic interests of Maud, her friends and her sources of inspiration,” he said.
Arriaga also pointed out that he was “a restless person who had the most relevant figures of surrealism as great friends.”
Photographs, paintings, drawings, enamels, watercolors, sculptures, magazines, catalogues, lithographs, decals, handwritten poems, books, family albums, cookbooks, cards, jewelry, etchings, photocollages, letters and linocuts, dated between 1923 and 1985, make up ‘Maud, c’est la vie!’
In this exhibition, the creations of Maud Bonneaud (also known as Maud Domínguez and Maud Westerdahl)–many of which are shown to the public for the first time–are exhibited alongside works and documents by Óscar Domínguez, André Breton, Paul Éluard , Eduardo Westerdahl, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Hausmann, Valentine Penrose, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, Izis (Israëlis Biedermanas), Tanja Tamvelius. Eileen Agar, Manolo Millares, Man Ray, Apel-les Fenosa, Dora Maar, Pedro Flores, Honorio García-Condoy, André Marchand, José Abad, Martín Chirino, Françoise Gilot, Paul Éluard, César Manrique, Pablo Serrano, Valentine Penrose, Cándido Camacho, Maribel Nazco, Fernando Mignoni, Gjon Mili, Jacqueline Breton, Jeanne Megnen, Françoise Gilot, Michette Mabille, Guy Bernard-Delapierre, José Hernández Muñoz, Juliet Man Ray, and Oldrich Imácek.
“It is a unique opportunity to get closer to Canarian and European art of the last hundred years,” added Enrique Arriaga, who confessed that he is proud that “an exhibition of this caliber opens its doors at TEA.”
Alejandro Krawietz stressed that ‘Maud, c’est la vie!’ It is “a really important exhibition, since in addition to highlighting a major and difficult to recover figure from the avant-garde of the islands such as Maud, it represents the culmination of a research process of more than two years”.
And it is that, according to the island director, “an art center like TEA must investigate the historical processes that make up the cultural tradition of the islands and the recovery that this exhibition fosters is part of the history of TEA”.
Gilberto González explained that this exhibition is embedded in the context of another series of TEA exhibitions “through which we try to understand the cultural context that has preceded us and how that context has built us and generated a present”.
PROMOTE RESEARCH
In his opinion, “at TEA we want to promote research and for this to be the interface so that citizens can understand, can navigate in that past that is often complex and not unique”.
In addition, he highlighted the work done by Pilar Carreño. “If there is someone who has been able to structure rigorously, but at the same time in a passionate way, what has been the time of the avant-garde is Pilar Carreño,” he asserted.
Pilar Carreño, curator of this exhibition that commemorates the centenary of the birth of Maud Bonneaud, explained that this exhibition gives Maud the recognition she deserves.
He also highlighted “the translation that Maud as a creator makes from the ancient and medieval world to the contemporary with a language that has its roots in surrealism” and valued “her enormous generosity, her critical sense and her intelligence”.
With this exhibition, he said, “I have not tried to make a scale map of Maud’s works or those of her artist friends, I have only selected ten percent of them, I have conceived this exhibition based on the testimony of the Maud who left in her memoirs the three men who had marked her life, Breton, Domínguez and Westerdahl put them on her path”.
In addition, he thanked the generosity of the collectors, individuals and institutions that have donated their works and documents for this exhibition and explained that ‘Maud, c’est la vie!’ It is structured in three areas: Maud enameller, Breton and Domínguez and Circle of friends.
