Writing about his father, the filmmaker Jean Renoir said: “He looked at flowers, women and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress.” Renoir: Intimacy, the first retrospective in Spain to focus on the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), challenges the traditional concept that reduces Impressionism to the “purely visual”. Rather, it emphasises the central role played by tactile sensations in Renoir’s paintings, which are present in all the different phases of his career and are expressed through a wide range of genres including group scenes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes.
Curated by Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition is sponsored by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and presents a survey of 78 works by the artist loaned from museums and collections worldwide, including the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Renoir: Intimacy shows how the artist made use of the tactile qualities of volume, paint and textures as a vehicle to evoke intimacy in its various forms (friendship, the family or erotic ties) and how that imagery connects the work to the viewer through the sensuality of the brushstroke and the pictorial surface.
18 October 2016 to 22 January 2017 at The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (Spain)
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