JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCIA

There are no contradictions. Nothing is incompatible. These were the tenets that guided Torres-Garcia’s life, the life of a writer, painter, sculptor, teacher, theorist, muralist, novelist and architect; a renaissance man of the highest order. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1874, he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain in 1891 and began a career as an artist. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found numerous schools, groups and movements including the first European Abstract art group and push the art and culture of Europe and South America to its vanguard. It was the duality of his homeland and his adopted nations that drove Torres-Garcia, and his ability to hold this duality together in a single mind. He existed between places, carrying the identity of Uruguay with him everywhere, and in doing so he was able too to carry the new and the old, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction. There are no contradictions, he said, nothing is incompatible.

EDWARD HOPPER

A far-off storm felt under clear skies, ground swells are harbingers of things to come, messengers of danger. When Hopper painted this work in 1939, he could feel a change brewing in the air. The Second World War was looming and American isolationism was beginning to wane, it would not be long before they were a part of the conflict happening across the sea. To this uneasy world, Hopper responds with a depiction of freedom, of youth, and of the surging promise of youth, The boys on the boat look out to a buoy in the water, ringing with the motion of the waves. They are sun drenched and the sea water spits up gently, but they are off kilter. Small waves rock their boat ever so slightly, but the waves seem unrelenting. Hopper was most known for his depictions of urban loneliness and melancholy and this picture, with its vibrant blues and idyllic scene, seems anomalous. Yet the same themes pervade, on a grander, more cosmic scale. Hopper depiction of a happy American scene is perhaps his most ominous of all.

REMBRANDT

Approaching death, the greatest painter of his age leaves us with a final word of hope for forgiveness and salvation. A son, wretched and wasteful has spent the fortune his father gave him on frivolity and decadence and returns home begging for a lowly position to redeem himself, but is instead welcomed in open arms and embraced not for his sins but his penitence. This is the story that Rembrandt - master painter, portraitist and hero of the Dutch golden age - depicts as amongst the final works before he passes away and it is hard not to read it as a plea for how he will be treated in the afterlife. He does not represent it with biblical accuracy, but brings in unknown characters: a women, barely visible, most likely his mother and a seated figure representing a tax collector and his own ambivalence at the wealth he has built. Rembrandt is both the young son, coming home ashamed, and the older son, dissatisfied with the lack of reward for his loyalty in contrast to his brother. Both need salvation, both hope to come home and both, as Rembrandt, long for the embrace of a loving father to forgive them for the life they have led.