The concept behind the exhibition Carlos Maside – Luis Seoane. Aquel abrazo (Carlos Maside – Luis Seoane. That Embrace) is a conversation between the two first “all-encompassing” artists of Galician contemporary art through the letters they sent each other between 1947 and 1958. It is also a study on the influence that Maside had on Seoane’s work. Maside was Seoane’s aesthetic inspiration, as he was a pioneer in the application, from a theoretic and formal perspective, of the postulates of modernity in his paintings, thus breaking free from the academism and classicism of the previous generation. Seoane himself succesfully determined the virtues of Maside’s work: rigorously constructed paintings, careful forms and intensity of colour, and later, a vigorous composition and powerful drawing.
The exhibition has been produced in collaboration with the Santiago de Compostela City Council. It offers a selection of 27 pieces by Carlos Maside –most of them on loan from the Carlos Maside Estate– and 9 by Luis Seoane –from the Fundación’s collection–. There is also a portrait and a bust of Seoane created by another innovator of Galician art, sculptor Xosé Eiroa –whose work influenced both artists, but especially Luis Seoane–, and an unpublished poem that Seoane wrote in 1935 for Manuel Antonio –who, together with Rafael Dieste and Maside, made up the basis for the new codes that would come to define Galician modern art and culture–.