Curatorial text

Jour et Nuit is about the cycles of life, dichotomies, the continuity, and the rhythms of the universe. It is also the title of one of Madeleine’s most important works, created during her career spanning 60 years. It is a complex work in which the world is captured through colours, materials, textures, and gestures.

In this exhibition, Jour et Nuit will take us along the length and cycle of a lifelong practice of painting, a life in which the certainty of creation was as sure as the knowledge that, by nightfall, another day would emerge in a few hours. When investigating Madeleine’s œuvre, it is this culmination of contrasts, the cycles and the continuity, of life and death, of light and dark, of sweet and sour, that stands out.

Madeleine Spierer´s work has always explored the axis between the inner world and the outer world, a liminal space that she has explored since she was 12 years old when she began to draw and paint. Over the years we can see an evolution in her practice where the traces become more and more savage …..She paints with earth, sand, pigments, makes stains, tears paper, prints crookedly, all part of a fidelity to her inner process, materializing it in the world.
Madeleine dares, throughout her career, to explore far beyond what is 'beautiful', what is pleasant, what is comfortable. In her works she explores, through a significant variety of techniques, materials and supports, without limits imposed by the conventional.

In Villa Dutoit, across several rooms of the villa, visitors are invited to discover the extensive work of Madeleine, ranging from oil paintings, mixed media, drawings, and monotypes to sculptural masks that form part of the installation Cosmos i Gruta, created in La Bisbal de l’Empordà. The exhibition also features large-scale drawings that mark significant milestones in her career.

More than a retrospective, this exhibition is a celebration of a life devoted to the impulse of making art and of the remarkable consistency within that journey. It also represents the closing of a cycle in which many people have worked together to ensure that Madeleine’s work receives the attention it deserves.

Above all, Madeleine’s greatest wish was for her work to be seen. She did not create solely to express herself but was deeply interested in the interaction with the spectator. In many of her final writings, she emphasized her desire to share her art with the world. It is a gesture of bringing her work from darkness into light.

Born in 1926 in Trieste, Madeleine Spierer belongs to a generation of artists who, despite having dedicated her whole life to art, due to the circumstances of the time, always operated on the margins of the art world. Her relationship with the artist Bram van Velde underlines this ambiguous position, very close to the nuclei of art but far away at the same time. It is not until the nineties, already at a mature age, that she begins to exhibit, mainly in Geneva and Basel, Switzerland. During her life, having been raised in Geneva (because of World War II), she travels a lot to Paris, Madrid, Oslo and spends long periods in New York and El Salvador. During 2013, at the age of 88, she decided to move to Catalonia, Spain to carry out a large and significant work in an apartment in Bisbal d'Empordà.