The world-exclusive exhibition Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum features more than 160 works on paper by Francisco Goya (1746–1828), celebrating the artist’s extraordinary imagination. Goya is considered to be one of the first truly modern artists. In humorous observations, confronting depictions of violence, and surreal flights of fantasy, he presents a vision of humanity that had no equivalent in the art of his day.
Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum features 44 drawings on loan from the Prado Museum in Madrid, the largest group of Goya’s drawings ever seen in Australia. Ranging from bold ink to delicate red chalk drawings, the works on display have been selected by the Prado especially for this NGV presentation. They include examples from the artist’s earliest albums of social satires through to the enigmatic visions and dreams recorded in his late drawings. This rich and diverse selection of drawings showcases the breadth of Goya’s drawing practice, as well as offering a rare insight into the artist’s image-making process.
The works from the Prado collection are complemented by 120 etchings from Goya’s renowned print series, including the Caprichos 1797–98, which satirised vices and follies in Spanish society; the Disasters of War 1810–15, based on the atrocities of the war and famine that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808; the Tauromaquia c. 1815–16 on the subject of bullfighting; and the enigmatic Disparates c. 1815–19, made during the reign of Ferdinand VII, whose suppression of civil liberties affected the lives of many intellectuals and reformers, including Goya and his friends. The prints are drawn from the NGV Collection with fifteen works on loan from the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum
25 June – 3 October 2021
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
www.ngv.vic.gov.au
