Espai Carmen Thyssen Sant Feliu de Guíxols
De l'arqueologia al present artistic de Sant Feliu de Guíxols
This exhibition, born of a collaboration between the Espai Carmen Thyssen and the History Museum of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, offers an exercise in correspondence between the distant past and the contemporary present — between the material lives of the Iberian, Greek, and Roman settlers, and the modern perspectives of artists connected to this very same territory. Chronological distance becomes not an obstacle but a bridge: the archaeological pieces held in the History Museum, imbued with memory, share display cases with contemporary works that draw from the same soil, the same light, the same sea.
The participating artists — Ricardo Campos and Rosa Rosell (Kypsela), Areté d’Empordà, Ana Gutiérrez, Esperança Feixas, Pepa Poch, and Quimeta Serra — engage in a dialogue with objects from the permanent collection that illustrate essential aspects of ancient life: the working of metals and fibres, ceramics as both utilitarian medium and expressive surface, beliefs, commerce, death, superstition, or the arrival of new cultural values. Thus, each contemporary piece becomes a mirror, a sensitive echo, a poetic response, or a conceptual extension of what has reached us across the centuries.
This dialogue between materials — earth, fire, pigment, thread — and intentions — function, ritual, beauty, communication — invites us to recognise a subtle continuity between the ways of living and creating, past and present. For the essential gestures that shape a culture persist, even as languages and contexts shift.
The exhibition is also a homage to the creative force of the land itself: a landscape that has always been a source of inspiration, labour, and connection with the wider world. Today, as in times past.
Here, art becomes a bridge between past and present.
Pilar Giró
Curator of the Exhibition
