Exhibition "Francesc d'Assís Galí: Exili i evasió" at the MUME

Exhibition "Francesc d'Assís Galí: Exili i evasió".

From November 30, 2024 to July 13, 2025

Opening: Saturday, November 30, 2024 at 12 noon.

Curated by Albert Mercadé and artistic curated by Artur Muñoz (Coltell estudi).

This exhibition is a project organized by the Exile Memorial Museum (MUME) in collaboration with the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC), which in 2025 will organize an exhibition dedicated to the same artist entitled "Francisco de 'A. Galí. The Invisible Master". This exhibition will take place in the Sala de la Cúpula and in rooms 63 and 64 of Modern Art at the MNAC between May 9 and September 14, 2025.

Francisco de Asís Galí i Fabra (Barcelona, 1880-1965) was a painter, draughtsman and teacher, linked to the noucentista movement. He studied at the Escuela de Lonja and was a disciple of Alexandre de Riquer in the water technique. His painting began with a modernist principle, passing through the phases of symbolism and reality, until with the legend of modernism it evolved towards new ideas with a certain idealism.

He also devoted himself to teaching, founding in 1906 a school in Barcelona against traditional teaching, the Galí School of Art, and among other artists, his disciples were Esteve Monegal, Manuel Humbert, Ignasi Mallol, Joan Miró, Josep Llorens Artigas, Rafael Benet, Ernest Maragall, Marian Espinal or Lluís Plandiura.

His pictorial work includes the frescoes in the Barcelona Post Office building from 1928, those in the dome of the National Palace made for the Universal Exhibition of 1929 and the paintings in the Don Quixote Room of the Casa de la Ciudad. from Barcelona in 1958.

He was appointed by the Generalitat as one of the members of the Fine Arts Council of the New Unified School (CENU). Despite the short time that Galí was at the CENU, he was responsible for the curriculum of artistic education. position of Director General of Fine Arts of the Republic, at which time the most important artistic heritage safeguarding operation in recent history was carried out, sheltering more than three thousand works of art, among which were those of the Prado, who were evacuated to Switzerland, in a heroic and little-known episode, passing through Valencia, Barcelona and the Empordà (Figueres, Peralada and La Vajol).

His exile in London between 1939 and 1949 decisively transformed his way of understanding art and the world.

Galí was a vocational, multifaceted and humanist artist, whose works are now part of the history of modern Catalan art, such as the murals of the National Palace of Catalonia or the posters for the Barcelona International Exposition.