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Rocio Castro. Communication Department.
September 30, 2010
Seville, 30 September 2010.- The Focus-Abengoa Foundation is presenting an exhibition from its own collection called “View Seville. Five perspectives through 100 prints”, at the Hospital de los Venerables in Seville. After three years without being exhibited, the exhibition has now been adapted to new technologies, which will allow visitors to delve into Seville’s most majestic era (the 16th and 17th centuries), while also offering a graphic insight into the evolution of the city through to the 20th century.
Thanks to its digitalisation, the exhibition offers visitors the possibility to use interactive screens to compare the panoramic engraving of Seville (Symon Wynhoustz Frisius, 1617) held by the Naval Museum in Madrid, with the painting “Vista de Sevilla” (anon, 1650-1660), owned by the Focus-Abengoa Foundation. The two images are taken from the same perspective in the Triana neighbourhood of Seville and show a similar view of the city but at two different moments in time. The first shows a Seville that is growing at the beginning of the century, while the second shows a Seville immersed in the crisis in the middle of the century, which the artist produced using the illustration by Mathäus Merian (1593-1650), which is held by the Foundation.
The collection of prints, comprised of engravings and lithographs belonging to the Foundation’s iconographic collection, sets out to communicate the value of these documents as a graphic testament of the future of the city between the 16th and 20th centuries. The exhibition, which is open until 8 December at the headquarters of the Focus-Abengoa Foundation in Seville, offers visitors the opportunity to travel through Seville and unravel the numerous nuances of its past through the prisms of five transverse perspectives: the geography, the pedestrian, the festivities, the archaeology and the romanticism.
The updated version of the exhibition maintains this approach and also uses “the power of images” as the underlying narrative, offering a new window to help discover a Seville at the time of Diego Velázquez: “The urban theatre”, the physical and architectonic side of the city; “Human geography”, the economic and social mosaic that drives the city, and “Topography of Velázquez”, a carefully chosen itinerary of locations and people associated with the life and work of the painting genius from Seville.
Many of these locations and characters inspired the Seville artist who regularly featured them in his paintings: noblemen and caped people with ruff necks, such as the picture of his father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco, who he painted around 1619; clergymen, monks and the common people in particular, from the elderly and the young through to the servants and slaves that inhabit his “Old Woman Cooking Eggs”, his “Water seller”, and his “lunches” and domestic scenes.
In addition to the exhibition, and as part of the activities planned for this autumn, the 7th edition of the Baroque School will take place, entitled “The power of the image: Portraits of the baroque city”, directed by Richard L. Kagan, professor of modern European history at Johns Hopkins University and one of the leading specialists on urban views in the Hispanic world. The course, organised by the Focus-Abengoa Foundation in collaboration with Universidad Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP), will take place from 22 to 25 November at the Hospital de los Venerables in Seville.
The musical activities, focused on the organ, will complete the program, which includes concerts to promote new organists, entitled “The power of baroque music in the identity of European cities”; the master class “The organ of the Netherlands”; and the series of master concerts entitled “The Central European organ: forging cultures”.
This range of outstanding cultural and educational activities stems from the desire of the Focus-Abengoa Foundation to become a leading international centre for studying the Baroque era.
The Focus-Abengoa Foundation was created in 1982 as a result of the cultural work begun in 1972 by Abengoa with the publication of the works “Themes of Seville” (Temas Sevillanos) and “Iconography of Seville” (Iconografía de Sevilla). A collection of documents, books and engravings on the Kingdom of Seville and by Sevillian authors was created during the same period. This initial cultural work showed Abengoa’s directors the importance of the company’s involvement in activities that directly benefit society, beyond its core technology work, which led to the creation of the Seville Cultural Fund Foundation.
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