The Museo del Realismo Español Contemporáneo (MUREC, Almería) presents the exhibition Almería. La tierra ausente by the painter Joseba Sánchez Zabaleta (Cistierna, León, 1970), in which he expresses the sensitive and spiritual experience that the province produces in him and how it has inspired him to create his series El olvido que nos habita, from which 18 works dating from the last five years have been selected for the occasion.
Committed to realism, Sánchez Zabaleta reflects through painting on the objects that surround us and on the creative process itself: visual poetry. Using elements from nature and the Almerian landscape, everyday objects and abandoned buildings, he shows the perishable, the passing of time and the transformation of matter. Each of his paintings evokes silence and from introspection invites the viewer to become the protagonist of the scene, starting from contemplation and meditation, in a painting of pause and stillness.
The exhibition, organised by the Ibáñez Cosentino Art Foundation in collaboration with the Diputación de Almería and curated by Juan Manuel Martín Robles, delves into a lesser-known Almería, because the painter’s creative process maintains a constant, the search for places that move, those which, from the ruins and through a refined painting, are shown in a desolate and absent space.
The landscapes that will be on display until 30 March in Room 2 of temporary exhibitions at the MUREC feature Cabo de Gata, a refuge for the artist, where his ideas for painting and the inspiration of everyday life come from. A landscape full of silence where the humble vegetation, the passing of time, the clamour of its landscapes and the echo of the voices of its people cohabit.
Through different pictorial constructions, the painter explores the concept of inhabiting, which has lost meaning and significance, associated with a mere physical aspect, that of a simple occupation of space. However, from his painting, he proposes an anthropological and philosophical vision of how we inhabit a territory from a symbolic, physical and aesthetic construction, from a concern for rootedness and forms of belonging.
From the perspective of the traveller-painter, architecture, the fragment and the fragile take centre stage in each of the pieces that make up this exhibition. Memory and its debris become the objective narration of the passage of time, in a dialogue between past and future.
