MACVAC Vicente Aguilera Cerni Museum of Contemporary Art in Vilafamés has announced 'Claudia i Manuela', a joint exhibition bringing together works by Claudia de Vilafamés and Manuela Ballester. According to the museum’s July 2022 agenda, the exhibition runs from 12 March to 4 September and presents figurative works by the two artists under themes of the fleeting and the everyday. The announcement frames the pairing as a shared exploration of figurative language marked by everyday strangeness and ephemerality.
The exhibition adds another chapter to MACVAC’s long-running attention to artists connected to the museum and to the town of Vilafamés. In the agenda text, the museum says the idea of bringing the two artists together comes from their use of a language that both handle with equal assurance. The show is also presented in the context of the museum’s collection and its broader effort to make visible artists represented in its holdings.
Claudia de Vilafamés is described in the museum’s text as having been born in Vilafamés in the late 1960s. MACVAC notes that the museum itself was a catalyst for her decision to take up painting and pursue the artists she admired. In the same description, the museum characterizes her as an established artist whose hyperrealist world is guided by poetry before photographic reference, with fruits, cloths and other subjects rendered as at once real and imagined.
Manuela Ballester is presented in the agenda as being born in València in the first decade of the 20th century. MACVAC describes her as one of the painters displaced by war, but not silenced by it, adding that she continued painting in Mexico and Germany. The museum situates her work within a figurative language where objects and figures carry a degree of enigma, with surreal elements appearing in some works and a more reality-based approach in others.
The museum’s text also stresses the emotional register of Ballester’s art, describing it as marked by nostalgia and solitude. It adds that she was long eclipsed by a family of male artists and is now being reclaimed as one of the essential figures in the museum’s view. MACVAC says it holds a substantial number of her works and that the exhibition serves as a recognition the institution considered itself to owe her.
Alongside the exhibition notice, the museum’s newsletter says a catalogue for 'Claudia i Manuela' is available in both paper and digital form. The same agenda also notes that the exhibition can be visited from 12 March to 4 September, without adding further curatorial detail in the source material. The announcement is part of a wider monthly update that lists other exhibitions, activities and institutional news, but the verified details for 'Claudia i Manuela' focus on the two artists, their figurative approaches and the exhibition dates in Vilafamés.
