Luis Gordillo is the great transformer of Spanish painting in the second half of the 20th century.
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The Museum of Contemporary Art was inaugurated in 1972 in a building located next to the Archive of the Indies which originally housed the treasury of the Chapter House. The first director Víctor Pérez Escolano, a great promoter of avant-garde art, organised numerous temporary exhibitions and acquired an important collection of Spanish modern art. |
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The creation of the museum coincided with the emergence of a new creative movement which benefited from economic development and the beginning of a slight relaxing of Franco's dictatorial regime. Numerous galleries opened in the city such as Juana de Aizpuru and Centro M11, which enjoyed the support of painters (like Manuel Salinas), critics (Quico Rivas and Juan Manuel Bonet) and patrons like Jose Guardiola. It was the M11 who, in 1974, organised the first anthological exhibition of Sevillian painter Luis Gordillo (1934), considered the great innovator of Spanish painting in the second half of the 20th century. When the Carthussian Monastery, La Cartuja, was restored, the museum was closed and its permanent collections were stored there as part of the collection of the Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art. Some of the most important Sevillian artists of the 20th century include: Gustavo Bacarisas, Francisco Mateos, Bartolomé Romero Ressendi, Francisco Cuadrado, Francisco Cortijo, Carmen Laffón, Teresa Duclós, Manuel Barbadillo, Juan Romero, Manuel Salinas, José Ramón Sierra, Manuel Quejido, etc. |