Six artists from the province are featured in a newly opened exhibition this Thursday, showcasing works that reflect the vitality of the Valencian arts scene. The display aligns with recent acquisitions by the Ministry of Culture aimed at supporting contemporary creators settled in the Valencian Community, strengthening the regional arts sector and contributing to a shared heritage that will guide future collections (Citation: Ministry of Culture, Valencia).
The contemporary art program of the Generalitat Valenciana gathers pieces acquired in 2021 from twenty artists, including creators from Alicante and other parts of the province such as Ricardo Cases, Rosalía Banet, María Dolores Mulá, Perceval Graells, Clara Sánchez Sala, and Eduardo Infante. The presentation also features works by five artists from Castellón and eight from Valencia, highlighting a broad regional collaboration.
Perceval Graells and María Dolores Mulá attended the opening. After its run at the Center del Carme, the exhibition will travel to Elche in September. The installation unfolds across the spaces of l’Escorxador and the Medieval Market, a plan announced recently by José Luis Pérez Pont, who oversees the Valencian Community Museums Consortium (Cited commentary: Pérez Pont, Valencian Museums Consortium).
Graells’s triptych includes the work Not a pot and an ember for planting leather, created in 2021, where fabric is torn to reveal the thread and inner texture of the material, then reassembled with red thread to symbolize healing. The artist also presents a view of the salt flats at Santa Pola in a pink salt shaker motif, part of a series previously shown at ARCO in 1986, illustrating a dialog between landscape, memory, and material gesture (Cited: Graells’s retrospective notes).
Eduardo Infante’s set titled Heat, Floral and Sparks presents twenty-four works of varying sizes inspired by romance from 2017 to 2020. The photography series The Cause of Oranges, created in 2014, offers a portrait of Levante’s spirit and contemporary Spain, inviting viewers to reflect on regional identity and social change (Cited: Infante’s catalog notes).
Rosalia Banet’s 2019 ceramic sculpture aggregates fragments from prior projects, embodying a critique of consumer culture through the absurd. Clara Sánchez Sala’s piece Shadow is the measure of light and life from 2019, created by emulsifying eleven sheets of cyanotype paper to capture the earth’s motion. These works together underscore a dialog between material experimentation and conceptual inquiry (Cited: Banet and Sánchez Sala notes).
This represents the fifth comprehensive presentation supported by the Valencian artistic heritage incentive, an initiative that began in 2017 and has already facilitated the purchase of 33 works. The Generalitat Valenciana Contemporary Art Collection now comprises 129 pieces, including 40 works by Alicante artists. The curators describe the collection as taking shape and gaining identity, with a balanced presence of men and women, regional representation, intergenerational perspectives, and a diversity of techniques that reflect a dynamic creative landscape (Cited: Generalitat Valenciana curatorial statement).
Regarding the distribution, the exhibition will be shown in Alicante city, with the consortium head noting that while they do not have their own headquarters, they are committed to the spaces offered for the展示. This openness to public spaces highlights a strategy of placing contemporary art where communities gather and where audiences can engage directly with new work (Cited: Consortium leadership statement).
It should be noted that the first display of the 33 works in the collection has not yet occurred in Alicante, as they have mainly been shown in Lonja and the City Council is coordinating a suitable date to align with the city’s schedule. The exhibition thus functions as a bridge, connecting the region’s artistic decisions with local cultural calendars and community access.