Isabel Baquedano Donation

The museum is sharing a selection of works from the Isabel Baquedano donation in gallery A (artist)

 

Dovetailing with the celebration of International Women's Day, the museum is presenting to the public in its Gallery A (artist) the first stop in the tour through the museum's permanent collection, a selection of paintings and drawings by Isabel Baquedano (Mendavia, Navarra, 1929–Madrid, 2018) from the donation that the artist's family made to the museum in 2020, accompanied by another work also donated by a private collection.

Isabel Baquedano started her career in the early 1960s, at a time when very few female artists managed to forge a career of their own. Following her indisputable vocation, she began working in realistic figuration, yet without losing sight of Pop Art and social criticism. First urban landscapes and everyday reality and later themes from art history like the circus and the Old and New Testaments were part of her far-reaching interests.

In order to reclaim a place for the works of this unique, “secret” artist, the museum held the first retrospective on her works and published the first monographic study on it in 2019. Entitled On Beauty and the Sacred, the show was presented in Bilbao and later travelled in a different format to the Museum of Navarra and the University Museum of Navarra in Pamplona, indispensable partners in the entire recovery project, along with the painter's family. Also essential was the work of the sculptor Ángel Bados, the artist's close friend with in-depth knowledge of her oeuvre.

Along with the invaluable trove of documents, the donation also includes outstanding examples from Baquedano's different creative periods and the themes that interested her throughout her entire career: self-portraits, portraits and everyday scenes featuring her family and friends, as well as some of her best-known series, including the ones devoted to different religious episodes, such as the emblematic representation of Adam and Eve.