At the beginning of the month, the 39th stop of the Multicultural Center's Round the World Tour: "The Library Meets the Prado – The King, the Painter and Their Paintings" exhibition opened in the exhibition hall on the first floor of the Guangzhou Library, exhibiting 29 of the most representative masterpieces of the Prado Museum, including the world-famous painting "Gong'e", and recreating the brilliance of Western painting art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century for the general public. The exhibition, which is new to China, aims to create an outside-museum museum that displays parts of Prado's collection in public spaces.
To this end, Guangzhou Library gives full play to cultural and creative thinking and carefully sets up exhibitions, reflecting the new model of immersive exhibition viewing and in-depth calligraphy and painting linkage "reading" artworks.
Prado Museum One of the "Four Greatest Art Galleries in the World"
At the end of the 19th century, the Prado Museum was hailed as one of the "four largest art galleries in the world" and is also the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Spanish paintings. Adhering to the concept of art "belongs to everyone", the museum has launched a series of blockbuster exhibitions around the collection of works, dedicated to "going out" and exposing art to the public, so its works will also leave its headquarters in Madrid and travel to Spain and around the world - this is the original intention of the "Meet prado" project.
The exhibition, which is new to China, aims to create an outside museum that "displays" parts of Prado's collection in public spaces for all members of the public. To this end, the exhibition carefully selects the 29 most representative works from the numerous collections, all reproduced in real size, so that the audience can appreciate the complete work and the wonderful details in it, including the use of color in each painting and the facial expressions of the characters.
Cultural and creative blind box helps interpret the "era of reading pictures"
In the "era of reading pictures", how should we appreciate pictures, how to understand and interpret the meaning of images, and how to use visual symbols to create? Xiao Kaiyin of the guangzhou library curatorial team said that in order to let the public better view the exhibition in the library, this exhibition deliberately adopts two "magic weapons": immersive viewing with the way of "role substitution"; and "reading" the exhibition in the way of the library. Different seals for this exhibition are set up in both areas to facilitate readers to "punch in". Readers who collect 3 seals and answer the questions in the brochure will have the opportunity to obtain a relevant blind box of cultural creativity.
The exhibition not only improves artistic literacy and absorbs relevant knowledge, but also participates in such a treasure-digging interaction, why not enjoy it? The reporter saw at the scene that several young readers expressed great interest in this practice. "Meet the Prado Museum" is not only a sentence written on the label, but also a new way to integrate the media era, so that the public can have a more understanding of art collection in many ways.
In order to bring a more realistic immersive exhibition atmosphere to the public, large-scale cut light equipment and professional lighting techniques are also used in the exhibition area to restore the rich sense of color and depth of European paintings from the 15th to 19th centuries as much as possible, creating an elegant and quiet light and shadow atmosphere.
In addition to working the exhibits and the viewing environment, the team of librarians, with the help of curatorial consultant Zhai Yue, also tried to give the audience a different experience on the narrative exhibition line: breaking the traditional chronological order in the arrangement of the exhibits, introducing the narrative line of the king, the painter and their paintings, leading the audience to enter the story perspective of the royal collector or creator, and creatively helping the viewer understand the artistry and spiritual significance of the painting as an other.
As the theme activity of the 2022 Guangzhou Reading Month, the organizers "moved" the Prado Museum to the Guangzhou Library, which not only lowered the threshold for the public to appreciate art, but also allowed them to carry out in-depth thinking about art in a familiar reading environment, and on the basis of "watching" the exhibition, with the help of the rich resources of the library platform, they could better "read" the exhibition.
At the scene, the reporter clearly saw the linkage between "book" and "painting": the negative floor exhibited paintings, and the multicultural space on the 8th floor was correspondingly arranged with the theme of "Meet the Prado" book fair, listing the relevant original art books for readers to understand in depth. In addition to the special book fair, the curatorial team will also launch various forms such as expert lectures to help the public appreciate the art of Western painting in a cross-cultural context and re-examine the world's famous paintings from the perspective of reading.
The exhibition will continue to be on display in the exhibition hall on the first floor of the Guangzhou Library until May 15.
Blockbuster exhibits "unveiled" in Guangzhou
The paintings exhibited in this exhibition highly reproduce the texture of the original work, and through the delicate reproduction of the colors of the oil paintings and the tiny expressions of the characters, these classics that span many centuries are perfectly presented to the public, so that everyone can "tour" the Prado Museum in the library.
One of the "Three Famous Paintings of the World"
"Gong'e"
Among them, "Gong'e" is an oil painting depicting court life created by the 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, which is listed with the Mona Lisa and the Night Watch as the "Three Famous Paintings in the World".
In the picture, the court painter Velázquez is painting a portrait of King Philip IV and his wife, when the little princess Margarita suddenly breaks in, and the palace ladies are clustered next to the princess. This painting is more complex in terms of spatial composition and the expression of the human level, leaving endless room for interpretation for future generations.
In addition to allowing readers to appreciate this famous painting at close range, Xiao Kaiyin said that the curatorial team deliberately made multiple splits and spatial arrangements for the elements of the painting, and built the classic set of "Gong'e" in three dimensions, so that readers can "walk" into the painting before entering the exhibition hall and personally experience the subtlety of the composition of the work.
Stepping into the exhibition hall, the pictures are full of stories and unfold like pages. The exhibition is divided into three parts, readers can assume the identity of the king or painter, feel their taste and personality from the paintings, feel the vividness in the paintings in the painting style, and glimpse the panorama of history and art. Eventually, all the chapters are interwoven at the heart of the exhibition, providing a possible entry point for interpreting Velázquez's extremely complex, mysterious, and mysterious painting. The main points of the painting carefully marked by the curatorial team allow the audience to return here after immersing themselves in a circle, and then read them carefully, with a sense of sudden enlightenment.
"Father of Self-Portraits" Dürer Classic
《Self-Portrait》
Other exhibits include the classic "Self-Portrait" (replica) by the German artist Dürer, known as the "Father of Self-Portraits", titian Vecherio's famous work "Charles V at the Battle of Fort Mill" (replica), and the early reproduction "Mona Lisa" created by Leonardo da Vinci's workshop.
These exhibits contain a number of paintings with more complex spatial levels and figures, the pictures themselves are quite readable. During that period, the situation throughout the European continent was turbulent, and in the context of scientific and technological development and geographical discovery, whether it was the king who collected paintings, the painters who created paintings or their paintings, they all had their own destinies, which also provided multiple interpretations for the exhibits. (Sun Jun)
Source: Guangzhou Daily