Julio González: Being an Artist

The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) presents a new reading of the work of Julio González based on 250 works from the IVAM Collection. The exhibition proposes a continuous vision of his works though subjects of academic origin that pervade his entire oeuvre, from the female nude, the academic study par excellence, which González developed in all its aspects, to motherhood, culminating in the sculpture Montserrat for the 1937 Pavilion of the Spanish Republic. Besides drawings, paintings, jewellery and sculptures from the IVAM Collection, the exhibition also includes a large number of manuscripts, letters, documents and photographs that not only complement or contextualise his work but form an essential part of it.

Apparently, the starting point of the oeuvre of Julio González is doubly traditional. On the one hand, because its origin lies in an artisan’s studio, his father’s metal workshop, and on the other, because his true desire in the face of that destiny was to be an artist, in the idealised sense given to that word at the turn of the century. The point of arrival, on the other hand, is the extraordinary work of a sculptor who has conquered that “tyranny,” making iron and his craft into precisely the revived material and condition of a drastically new oeuvre and an undisputed protagonist of the great transformations experienced by art in the era of the avant-gardes.

For years, Julio González struggled desperately against his dual destiny as a craftsman and an artist, so that instead of an evolution, we find simultaneity, and instead of a path, a crossroads. On the one hand, his desire for art involves, without a paradox, overcoming the craft with the craft and iron with iron. On the other, the subjects treated by González from the beginning of his career, all traditional (from the academic nude to maternity, local custom or the modernist fondness for masks), are also those of his last phase, which straddles new simultaneities between a formal requirement for abstraction, demanded by art, and a social demand for realism, required by history.

Being an Artist. Julio González in the IVAM Collection is organised around these simultaneities and crossroads, trying to show a González who rebels against the artisanal tradition of his family, making this into one of his lines of force and also one of the irresolvable contradictions of his whole life and work, and who furthermore lives through the time of the avant-gardes, fully and consciously grounded in his era, as one of its greatest protagonists.