Goya May 17–August 16, 2020

The Fondation Beyeler is presenting one of the most important exhibitions ever devoted to Francisco de Goya outside of Spain.

For this show at the Fondation Beyeler, Francisco de Goya’s (1746–1828) ambivalent and contradictory position as one of the last outstanding portraitists in the European court artist tradition and as the inventor of enigmatic pictures realized in a self-created space of artistic freedom is the starting point to understanding his art. After all, herein lies the key to fathoming Goya’s modernism.

Many of the artist’s works depict human behavior in terms of an inscrutability and complexity that irrevocably derive from societal certainties and conventions. It is a pictorial world where moral objection is put to the test. Goya made use of traditional iconography, but just like morality, it too had lost its binding nature.

One of Goya’s most famous pictorial inventions bears the programmatic title The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (sheet 43 of “”). Whether it is the sleeping or, as in the Spanish title, dreaming reason that is being addressing here—in both cases it is scarcely the kind of reason that gives shape to Enlightenment utopias. Goya doesn’t point a reproachful finger. At most he issues an ironic warning, because he needs his multifarious monsters to push open the gate to a world where the boundaries between reality and dream are blurred. In his art, Goya is simultaneously a dreamer and an exorcist, perpetrator and victim. He approaches the drama of reason and unreason, of dreams and nightmares with the gaze of a spectator. His work bears testimony to the grotesque and cruel impositions that human existence is subject to.

In its selection of works and their presentation, the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition is guided by the idea of highlighting the complex and ambiguous totality that makes up Goya’s lifework, drawing from the wealth of his paintings, drawings, and prints. For it is only in an equitable juxtaposition of paintings and works on paper that the uniqueness of Goya’s pictorial world becomes tangible. At the Fondation Beyeler, the show’s visitors will embark on a journey into the comprehensible and the inconceivable, into the multivalent and the nonsensical. The at once surprising and unsettling juxtapositions of different pictorial realms open up unimagined horizons of experience and thus continually fascinate the beholder anew. This is one of the reasons why Goya’s works still represent today, just as they did a century ago, an intellectual as well as an aesthetic challenge.

The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler will focus on Goya’s mature and late creative period. To do justice to the formal and content-related wealth of his oeuvre, the show will include the entire spectrum of pictorial categories (genre scenes and portraits as well as still lifes and history painting) along with pictorial creations specific to the artist (images of bull fights, mental asylums, Inquisition tribunals, and witches’ sabbaths).

The presentation brings together over seventy paintings along with an assortment of some sixty superb drawings and thirty exquisite prints. Rarely seen paintings from Spanish private collections will be featured at the Fondation Beyeler, some for the first time, together with key works from the most renowned European and American museums and private holdings. The exhibition has been developed in cooperation with the Museo Nacional del Prado in .

The exhibition is generously supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation

Athene Stiftung Novartis Sulger-Stiftung

Press images are available at www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/media/press-images

Further information: Silke Kellner-Mergenthaler & Team PR / Media Relations Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, [email protected], www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen

Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. daily, Wednesday 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. GOYA 17 May – 16 August 2020

01 Francisco de Goya The Clothed Maja (La maja vestida), 1800–1807 Oil on canvas, 95 × 190 cm Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid © Photographic Archive. Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid

02 Francisco de Goya 03 Francisco de Goya 04 Francisco de Goya Straw Mannequin (El pelele), 1791–1792 Doña María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Witches’ Sabbath (El Aquelarre), 1797/ 98 Oil on canvas, 267 x 160 cm Álvarez de Toledo, XIII duquesa de Alba, 1795 Oil on canvas, 43 × 30 cm Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid Oil on canvas, 192 x 128 cm Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid © Photographic Archive. Museo Nacional del Fundación Casa de Alba, Palacio de Liria, Madrid Prado. Madrid

05 Francisco de Goya 06 Francisco de Goya 07 Francisco de Goya A Village The Family of the Infante Don Luis Still Life with Golden Bream (Doradas), 1808–1812 (Corrida de toros en un pueblo), 1808–1812 (La familia del infante don Luis), 1783–1784 Oil on canvas, 44,8 x 62,5 cm Oil on canvas, 45 x 72 cm Oil on canvas, 248 x 328 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Parma funded by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund and the Madrid Pratt Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund, 94.245 Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Press images: www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/media/press-images The visual material may be used solely for press purposes in connection with reporting on the exhibition. Reproduction is permitted only in connection with the current exhibition and for the period of its duration. Any other kind of use – in analogue or digital form – must be authorised by the copyright holder(s). Purely private use is excluded from that provision. Please use the captions given and the associated copyrights. We kindly request you to send us a complimentary copy.

FONDATION BEYELER