Palau Antiguitats, Clavell & Morgades and Artur Ramon Art, three galleries that share a great passion for art and collecting, present in this monographic exhibition the latest discoveries, together with four pieces from the Museu del Castell de Peralada, from the great master of Romanesque sculpture coinciding with the millennium of the consecration of Sant Pere de Rodes.
In loving memory of Jaume Barrachina
“The Master and Chance have brought together three antique dealers who represent a new professional generation through four pieces that not even in the best of our dreams we would have aspired to have. In the middle of the pandemic, when confinement had just been withdrawn, the antiques dealer Sergi Clavell, by chance, found a small sculpture in a house, a marble head, a fragment of feet from a relief and a fragment of a column with plant decoration by the Master of Cabestany. While this happened, the art historian and friend Jaume Barrachina, one of the Master’s great experts and collector of four of his works, left us prematurely as a result of a major illness.
Through Sergi Clavell we found out that three of these pieces had appeared, and we immediately realised that we were facing a unique discovery. After three years of persistence and a little bit of luck, we can finally show them to the world in order to find them a new home, ideally one with glass walls. The incorporation of Albert Martí Palau, owner of the only other piece by the Master that has been on the market in the 21st century, rounded off the project.“
Artur Ramon Navarro
The greatest scholar of the Master of Cabestany was Jaume Barrachina, to whom this exhibition is dedicated, and has the four pieces by the Master that he bequeathed to the Museu del Castell de Peralada and which they kindly lent to us.
Around these works we have structured a curatorial project and a scientific catalogue. And that is why we wanted to surround ourselves with the best specialists. We appreciate the enthusiasm that Dr. Manuel Castiñeiras and Jordi Camps showed us from day one, without whom this proposal would not have the solid and intellectual content it deserves. This exhibition intends to explain the need of the antiquarian profession in the protection and dissemination of our heritage. The tasks that it performs, sometimes complementary to the institutional ones, are not usually highlighted by those who, without the will to get to know us, still sees us from the prejudices of yesterday’s world, with a narrow-minded vision of art being unattached to the market.
