Starting next Thursday, September 17th, and running until January 15th, the Sala Tabala in the La Valona building at the Elche campus will host the collective exhibition 'Grammar of the Stroke'. This show proposes a dialogue between the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Vicente Aguilera Cerni of Vilafamés (MACVAC) and contemporary artists associated with the Garage Bonilla art gallery. The inauguration will take place tomorrow at 6:30 PM.
The exhibition focuses on the line, understood as gesture, trace, sign, writing, structure, and space. It serves as a tool to reflect on different forms of creation, memory, and representation. The selection of works combines pieces from the MACVAC collection with creations by contemporary artists linked to the Garage Bonilla gallery (Madrid), establishing a connection between various generations and artistic languages.
According to the organizers, the central idea is that the line, before being a drawing or writing, is a gesture—a trace capable of expressing, ordering, delimiting, constructing, or transforming space. The exhibition is structured around six conceptual axes: the origin of the gesture, the stroke as a wound, the line and order, the line as writing, the expanded line, and the contemporary line. These works demonstrate how the same element can acquire diverse meanings depending on the artist, context, and time.
Among the participating artists are names such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida, Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Robert Motherwell, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Carmen Calvo, Concha Jerez, José María Yturralde, Soledad Sevilla, and Joan Hernández Pijuán. It also includes contemporary creators linked to the Garaje Bonilla project, such as Trullo, Cyro, Cózar, Otón, Mazuecos, Cremades, Bersabé, Murán, Jiménez, and Cuadra.
The exhibition's curator, Rafael Bonilla, is a gallerist, curator, and cultural manager, as well as the director of Garaje Bonilla. His career has focused on promoting contemporary art and creating meeting points between artists, collectors, institutions, and the public. His curatorial work connects creation, contemporary thought, and the building of new audiences, articulating in this exhibition a transversal dialogue of the line as gesture, language, and visual thought.
