Centre for Contemporary Art, Seville

On a recent visit to Seville we went to the Centre for Contemprary Art on the island of Cataluya, where Columbus once lived.  The museum is in an an attractive and fascinating setting, a 15th century monastery that later became a ceramics factory in the 19th century before being restored to become the Centre for Contemporary Art.  As the visitor enters the museum one is first greeted by some fabulous displays of tiles from its days as a ceramics factory, the first gallery being the fabulous setting of the monastery church.

 In this part of the museum was from the CAAC collection and features work that was produced in the 1980s by  artists who were part of the Figura Group.  I particularly liked three of the exhibits:

 This piece is Design at the Service of Genetics, 1985 by Rafael Agredano.  I was fascinated by the abstract nature of the painting and enjoyed the richly saturated colours.  This appealed to me in the same way that rich, saturated photographs do.

 Here we have The Doubt, 1987 by Guillermo Paneque.  Again I liked the colour and can see why he gave it this title with its sombre blue tones.

This was my favourite and is untitled, painted in 1986 by Patricio Cabrera.  Again I enjoyed the colours but it reminded me of the rather abstract photographs from New York taken through mist windows by Saul Leiter.

Exhibited in another gallery were the works of two photographers.  The first by Maximo Moreno was a small collection of sepia portraits of local people and flamenco musicians.  The were great character portraits taken in the 1970s and 80s and had an old world feel to them.

The second set of photographs exhibited were by Miguel Trillo, born in Cadiz in 1953.  Again these images were portraits but this time in crisp black and white which gave a much more modern feel to them, but they were still taken in the 1980s.  They were of local pop artists all posing to make themselves look moody and James Deanish.   Since 1994 Trillo has been living in Barcelona, where he combines his work as a teacher with his travels and international artistic production. His work comprises partly generational documents and partly conceptual works on youth identity.Since the 1980s he has tried to portray the different urban tribes that have emerged in Spain, beginning with his homeland of Andalusia.