BOSTON, MASS.- Works on paper by fourteen leading Spanish abstract artists are being displayed in Cuenca: City of Spanish Abstraction, which examines many of the first artists associated with the now-renowned Museo de Arte Abstracto Español. Founded in Cuenca, Spain by Fernando Zóbel in the 1960s during the repressive regime of General Francisco Franco, the Museo became a literal refuge for artists seeking an environment of collaboration and innovation. Perched in the “hanging houses” of the medieval city, the Museo supported resistance against the current cultural and political climate, providing artists practicing abstraction with workshops to create prints and galleries in which to display them.

“It is an honor to work with the Fundación Juan March to be the first museum in America to offer a retrospective look at the genius behind the founding of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca and to pay tribute to the outstanding work born of collaboration among the earliest abstract artists associated with the city,” Netzer said.

Featured are works by artists Fernando Zóbel, Gustavo Torner, Gerardo Rueda, Eusebio Sempere, Eduardo Chillida, Manuel Millares, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, José Guerrero, Manuel Hernández Mompó, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Pablo Palazuelo, Jordi Teixidor, and José María Yturralde.

The rarely exhibited prints, etchings, lithographs, artists’ books, and serigraphs in Cuenca highlight Spanish abstraction’s embrace of a medium in danger of disappearance due to the lack of financial and cultural support for the arts under the Franco dictatorship. The Museo’s collection, donated to the Fundación Juan March in 1981, remains a hallmark of this achievement.

“These prints and lithographs are all but unknown in the United States,” said curator Elizabeth Thompson Goizueta, a part-time faculty member in BC’s Romance Languages and Literatures Department. “Over five decades ago, MoMA exhibited the first survey of Spanish abstract art and, in the intervening years, there has been little critical attention paid to the movement in this country. A reconsideration of these works in the post-Franco era will shed new light on their political import and timeless aesthetic.”

The installation includes a video filmed in Cuenca that chronicles the Museo’s formation and the exhibition is accompanied by a publication with essays by Goizueta and Manuel Fontán del Junco, director of exhibitions, Fundación Juan March.