Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) was one of the last great court artists and the first forerunner of modern art. He was both a painter of impressive portraits and an inventor of enigmatic, highly personal pictorial worlds.
Spanning more than 60 years, Goya’s career covers a period ranging from Rococo to Romanticism. He depicted saints and criminals, witches and demons, pushing open the gate to realms in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy become blurred. In his art, Goya shows himself a keen observer of the drama unfolding between reason and irrationality, dreams and nightmares.
The exhibition brings together around 70 paintings and more than 100 masterful drawings and prints. For the first time, seldom seen paintings from private collections are shown alongside key works from European and American museums and private collections.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new film by Philippe Parreno (1964) The artist devotes his new work to Goya’s long-destroyed country house and its legendary murals, the Pinturas negras (Black paintings). This installation illustrates Goya’s enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists from Picasso to Warhol to the present day.