Opening times:
From 3 August to 25 November 2018.
Commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death of Chilean artist José Venturelli, a temporary exhibition at the National Fine Arts Museum examines his legacy. The exhibition “José Venturelli, 30 years: humanist and traveler” also explores the inspiration he found in the great ideals and changes that marked the society of his time as well as his relations with intellectuals, politicians, working people and country dwellers and the impact of the cultural changes through which he lived.
The exhibition, curated by Christian Leyssen Silva and supported by the José Venturelli Foundation with financing from the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, reflects the artist’s interest in portraying the social reality of his time.
It includes prints, drawings, paintings, poster, murals and stained glass, covering his work in Chile (1942-1950/1966-1973), China (1951-1959), Cuba (1959-1964) and Switzerland (1973-1988). These are the principal countries in which he worked extensively and used as a base from which to visit other places.
Key events in Venturelli’s life included his friendship with Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros and their collaboration on the famous “Death to the Invader” mural in Chillán; Venturelli’s illustrations for the clandestine edition of the “Canto General” poems of Nobel poet Pablo Neruda; and his role as a forerunner of Latin America’s relations with the People’s Republic of China and his influence on Chinese art.
The murals he painted in Cuba for Che Guevara and Switzerland’s largest mural in the Balexert School are also important as well as those he painted for the main building of the University of Chile and the mythical UNCTAD III building in Santiago.
According to the curator, with its “expressionist realism”, the work of Venturelli “has three great thematic pillars: the suffering of the loss of dignity; a quest to recover this as an origin; and the construction of a common road. In these, in turn, there are two underlying motifs: the human being and nature, which he thinks of in a mutual and decisive existential continuity”.
