Rosario de Velasco

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is jointly organising with the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia an exhibition on the Spanish figurative painter Rosario de Velasco (Madrid, 1904 - Barcelona, 1991).

Curated by Miguel Lusarreta and Toya Viudes de Velasco, the artist’s great-niece, the exhibition features 30 paintings from the 1920s to 1940s (the earliest and the most important from Velasco’s career) and a section on her activities as an illustrator. Alongside well known works from museum collections, such as the famous oil Adam and Eve from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, with which the artist obtained the second-prize medal for painting at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1932, or The Massacre of the Innocents (1936) from the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, there will be others on display for the first time that have remained with Velasco’s family and in private collections, some unlocated until recently and only found and identified in the past few years.

Through a selection of paintings, drawings and illustrations and employing an approach that combines general art-historical issues and also explores aesthetic, social and political aspects, the exhibition aims to rediscover and reassess the work of one of the great Spanish women artists of the first half of the 20th century.

Following its showing in Madrid the exhibition will be seen at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia from 7 November 2024 to 16 February 2025.