Name: Telluric and primitive
Start: 2026-02-01T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-03-01T20:00:00+01:00
Location: malaga

Telluric and primitive

Event details

Plaza Carmen Thyssen (C/Compañía 10),, malaga, malaga

1 February 2026 until 1 March 2026

# Málaga

October 7, 2025 – March 1, 2026

THYSSEN MÁLAGA MUSEUM

Curated by:

Bárbara García Menéndez and Alberto Gil (MCTM Conservation Department)

Artists:

Benjamín Palencia, Alberto Sánchez, Ángel Ferrant, Maruja Mallo, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Manolo Millares, César Manrique, Eduardo Chillida, Martín Chirino, Juana Francés, Miquel Barceló, among many others.

With the collaboration of:

This exhibition offers a choral narrative that explores, through such evocative concepts as the telluric and the primitive, certain idiosyncratic keys to 20th-century Spanish art in its search for its own avant-garde.

The desire for rupture and renewal of various trends since the 1930s, among which it is possible to recognize elective affinities, stems from a common desire to reestablish artistic language, going back to an ancestral, primordial, essential, or visceral origin of pictorial or sculptural expression, with forms that emerge from the earth and its elemental essences or from the freest imagination of a creator transmuted into a demiurge.

The interest in geology, cave painting, and pure painting are presented here as a leitmotif of the plastic arts in Spain during much of the 20th century. From the pioneers of increasingly less realistic and canonical figurations in the years of the Republic and Spanish abstraction during the Franco regime, the discourse will thus cover the plastic research of numerous telluric and primitive artists who, as a group, in broader currents or strictly individually, resorted to specific languages to reveal the essence of nature and art, and offer it as a new beginning for avant-garde artistic expression.

The exhibition presents a very fertile and eclectic imaginary, where expressions based on the atavistic, the gestural, the graphic, the dreamlike, and the organic have a place. Where the telluric manifests itself in an art that, inspired by the forms, materials, and impulses of nature, proposes its own “natural creations,” with unusual, original, and surprising aspects that transcend reality and challenge chronological history. And where the primitive is not a mere aesthetic exercise, and in no case within the tribal tradition of the European avant-garde, but a creative, almost ontological principle that concerns our identity. Both act as driving forces behind a powerful and fascinating art form that defines a new idea of “Spanishness” through an earthy color palette, the sublimation of materials, and intense expressiveness.