In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Ordovas, we invite you to follow The Diary, a digital project by our team. Over the next year it will explore the many exhibitions we have mounted during the last ten years, including special contributions from team members sharing behind-the-scenes memories. We want to thank you all for your support over the last ten years; we appreciate it and look forward to what the next ten years will bring.
Auguste Rodin, Iris, messagère des dieux, 1896 Francis Bacon, Three Studies from the Human Body, 1967 (detail) Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in Dialogue installation view, Ordovas, 2013
Richard Serra Drawings installation view, Ordovas, 2021
‘Serra famously said, “Drawing is a verb.” In Verblist, he compiled a series of what he called “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Serra has talked at length about the central place this language-based drawing occupies in the development of his early sculptural practice. This work on…
At the beginning of September 1959, Francis Bacon travelled to Cornwall, seeking to escape the distractions of London, and took out a six-month rental on a studio in St Ives from the artists William Redgrave and Peter Lanyon. One evening at a party in St Ives, Redgrave noticed Bacon talking…
Paintings from Life: Caracci Freud brought together a striking group of head studies by the great seventeenth-century Bolognese painter, Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), and Lucian Freud (1922–2011), recognised today as one of the foremost painters of the twentieth century. This rare and illuminating collaboration between an historic public art collection and…
‘The general process that Serra uses to make this kind of drawing involves a viscous medium spread upon a horizontal surface, heavy sheets of handmade paper laid atop, and a set of metal weights that Serra uses as tools to press the paper onto the medium, adjusting them in his…
In 1954, Calder received a letter from Gira Sarabhai inviting him to come to India to stay with them and work while he was there. He was intrigued by the kite flying festival that took place in Ahmedabad on 14 January – ‘I certainly don’t want to miss that’ –…
Richard Serra Drawings, Installation view, Ordovas, 2021
Calder in India, Ordovas, 2012
Our second exhibition, Julio González, First Master of the Torch, was named after David Smith’s moving 1956 essay written for ARTnews on the occasion of Julio González’s exhibition at MoMA. Today, González is regarded alongside Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti as one of the foremost pioneers of modern sculpture, and the father…
Richard Serra, quoted in ‘An Interview with Richard Serra’ by Gary Garrels
Ordovas, 2011
Installation view of Richard Serra Drawings, 2021
Installation view of Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt, 2011 Opening dinner Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt, 2011
Richard Serra
Ordovas, 2011
‘Serra famously said, “Drawing is a verb.” In Verblist, he compiled a series of what he called “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Serra has talked at length about the central place this language-based drawing occupies in the development of his early sculptural practice. This work on…
Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt was our inaugural exhibition, and the first devoted to exploring the connections and influences of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits on Francis Bacon’s own self-portraits. Bacon considered Rembrandt’s self- portraits the artist’s greatest works. He spoke in depth about Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Beret in the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, which…
Gary Garrels, ‘An Interview with Richard Serra (2010)’, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective (Houston: Menil Foundation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 65. Richard Serra Drawings, Installation view, Ordovas, 2021.
Celebrating Ordovas , 2011—2021