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The Lázaro Galdiano Museum is hosting an exhibition in the Pardo Bazán Room from 16 March to 21 May that brings Peder Balke, Eugenio Lucas and Lars Hertervig together in an exhibition with 62 works from the 19th century.  It contextualises the three artists in the visionary romantic tradition, in line with other 19th century landscapers, such as Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner or Victor Hugo, and they are unveiled as innovators thanks to the unique way of expressing their interior landscapes

Curated by Knut Ljøgodt and Carlos Sánchez Díaz, it is a unique collaboration between Spain and Norway the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, the Centre for Hispanic Europe Studies (CEEH), the Stavanger Art Museum and the Nordic Institute of Art (NIA).

It brings together the work of the Norwegian artists Peder Balke  (1804-1887) and Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), and the Spanish artist Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1817-1870) for the first time ever and draws a parallel between their respective landscapes, with a common sensibility and the same desire for innovation in spite of never having met.  They captured their inner visions of nature through experimental formats and techniques and foreshadowed the loose manner of Impressionism and other modern artistic movements.

The works are on display in the Pardo Bazán Room, revealing the mysterious Arctic landscapes of Balke, one of the first painters to venture to the North (19 oils on canvas or board); Hertervig’s imaginative and captivating visions of the sky and earth (22 watercolours, oils and gouaches on paper); and Lucas Velázquez’s canvases, ink washes and drawings of landscapes dominated by the imagination and the randomness of his technique, the blemish with which he experiments an incipient abstraction (21 works, two of which have been restored for the occasion).

Image Credits:

• Cliff. 1850-1870. Ink wash, watercolour and gouache on paper. 440 x 583 mm passe-partout 60 x 80 cm). Inv. 09011
• Lars Hertervig, Primeval Forest. Around 1870-1880. Watercolour and gouache on paper. Stavanger Art Museum
• Peder Balke, Shipwreck, North Cape. 1870-1880. Oil on panel. Oslo, The Gundersen Collection