THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN LA CASA DEL SIGLO XV. An art gallery in Segovia 1963-2000

Its founders, Ángel and Jesús Serrano, set out to give the city a private contemporary art gallery that would become a receptive venue for the most significant creations in Spain and, at the same time, a launching pad for young provincial artists.

The current exhibition, a collaboration between the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente and the Obra Social Caja Madrid, is a testimonial to the gallery’s important artistic role in the past and a way of introducing it to those who were unable to know its work directly. The show consists of an anthological selection of 125 works, all of which were exhibited in the gallery in their day, representing almost five hundred individual and collective showings and with the participation of approximately 300 artists. From the outset, Ángel and Jesús Serrano were adept at bringing together the various tendencies that were prevalent in our country during that time: Informalism, geometric abstraction, Pop Art, New Figuration and critical realism. Because of limited space, not all the artists who passed through the gallery are present in this exhibition, although they are mentioned in the catalogue in the chronological list of exhibitions and artists. As a complement to the activities which revolved around La Casa del Siglo XV, the exhibition also contains a representative number of posters, photographs and documents from its archive.

The exhibition is organized around a series of categories:

– Artists represented in monographic shows:
Masters of Spanish art: Picasso, Joan Miró, Eduardo Chillida, Joan Brossa, Emiliano Barral…

– Spanish and foreign painters and sculptors: Rafael R. Baixeras, Mon Montoya, Alfredo Alcaín, Elena Asins, Emiliano Alvarado, Chema Peralta, Javier Riera, Leandro Silva, Sel Jiménez, Francis Bacon, Santiago de Santiago, Joaquín R. Camín, Lennie Bell, Ricardo Calero…

– Artists present in collective expositions:
Graphic work of Spanish and foreign artists: Rafael Canogar, José Hernández, Manuel Hernández Mompó, Maruja Mallo, Darío Villalba…

– Unusual projects (represented by works, videos or documents):
Interventions in the city: “Moro. Invasions” (1977), “Coomonte. Sculptures” (1978)

– Collective exhibitions:
“Black on White. International Exhibition of Mail Art” (1978)…

– Documentation: Posters, postcards, photographs…

If we take into account the historic and cultural context of Spain at the beginning of the 60s, the most innovative trends in art were largely unknown or scorned. For this reason, the task carried out by La Casa del Siglo XV in a city like Segovia, was heroic and necessary and continued to be so until the end. In this sense, its role as a modernizing agent of taste and its nature as a window open onto the present cannot be overlooked. It was also, like so many other silent and laborious projects, a factor in the normalization of our culture in the last decades of the Franco era and the beginning of democracy. A mark of the prestige earned by the gallery is the fact that the Serrano brothers were able to win the confidence of artists and gallery owners throughout the country who eagerly responded to their requests for collaboration. Thus, it was possible to organize the first exhibition of Joan Brossa outside Cataluña (1978), devote a show to Picasso in 1967 at a time when the artist from Malaga was considered persona non grata by the official cultural establishment and pioneer celebrations of Mail Art (1978) or public art (1977).

The owners of La Casa del Siglo XV meticulously preserved all the documentation pertaining to the activity of the gallery. Realizing the importance of its trajectory, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente initiated a project in 2001, funded by the Obra Social Caja Madrid, to make an inventory and catalogue of the archive (over 10,000 documents), the library and artistic legacy (over 800 paintings, sculpture and graphic works) of the gallery. Drawing on the material in this rich artistic archive, it was possible to bring the present exhibition to its logical culmination.