This year we wanted the MNAC Christmas card to be chosen by an artist. We asked Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) to select a work from our collection in order to wish you a Happy New Year.

Mari Chordà is a multi-faceted creator, plastic artist, poet and promoter of collective feminist and socio-cultural projects. From 1965 to 1966 Mari lived in Paris where she began to create her own original paintings that addressed the topics of sexuality and the body using a language that lies between pop and abstraction. In 1968 she founded Lo Llar culture centre in Amposta and in 1977 she co-founded the pioneering women’s space La Sal Feminist Library Bar in Barcelona, later going on to establish the publishing house bearing the same name.

In the late 1960s Mari Chordà engaged in a highly original style of painting based on abstraction, and on the bright colours and the entertaining spirit of pop art, although addressing certain issues and taking on an iconography, which were way ahead of her time, linked to sexuality and nature.

In recent years Chordà’s work has witnessed a national and international revival at a host of exhibitions. As part of its collections, the MNAC retains her fundamental work Pregnant Self-Portrait, 1966-1967), in addition to Secretions, 1968), both of which are representative of her pop period. Their iconography, with reference to sexuality and the female body, is hugely personal and the style reflects the flat colours and ornamental effects of psychedelic pop.

See the work chosen by Mari Chordà in this video. What about you? What work from the Museum would you choose to say Happy New Year? Share it on social media using the hashtag #NadalaMNAC

The MNAC, with women, with women artists,

always!

We are women 365 days a year

As every March, we join the 8M movement by championing women artists throughout the year. For years now, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya has been working to give visibility to women who have been left out of art history and to restore them to the place they deserve.

The activities scheduled in March include the dance tours The Museum Dances in the Feminine; gender-focused tours You Should Have Been Women and One Artwork, 15 Minutes; and the family workshop Heroines. In addition, on Sunday, March 8, International Women’s Day, admission to the museum is free for all women.

On the Canal +MNAC, as well as on our social media, throughout this week you will find content explaining the work of reparation and remembrance aimed at placing women artists at the center.

Art against the oppression of Francoism

From 10 April onwards, some of the works that have recently entered the collection of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya can be seen in galleries 81 and 81 bis of the Modern Art section.

In gallery 81, under the title A Possible Modernity, visitors will discover how artists, despite the suffocating atmosphere of Francoism and the harshness of the immediate post-war years, continued to create in pursuit of an avant-garde language, with the group Dau al Set at its core.

Gallery 81 bis, entitled Between Introspection and Revolt, explores how women artists portrayed women during Francoism, within an authoritarian context marked by a total lack of rights. Altogether, the display features works by 15 women artists and 9 male artists.