Museo Nacional del Prado and Fundación AXA announced On the Reverse, a journey that moves beyond the surface of artistic masterpieces to allow for the contemplation of a fascinating reality: the hidden side of the work of art, its reverse.
In Las Meninas, the painter Diego Velázquez looks out at viewers from behind a large canvas of which we can only see the reverse and which occupies a considerable proportion of the pictorial surface. Through this canvas nailed to a wooden stretcher the painter refers to the image as artifice, opening a door for us onto a secret dimension.
On the Reverse addresses issues that have never previously been brought together and in which there is also space for imaginative interpretations: the emergence of the reverse as a pictorial motif in two sub-genres: the self-portrait of the artist behind the canvas and the depiction of the picture back in trompe l’oeil; the poetic reading of the stretcher as a cross; two-sided paintings; the back as a field for experimentation and subjective expression; aesthetic appreciation of the material nature of the works, and the issue of the viewer seen from behind, which makes us aware of the particular spatial relationships that are generated by human interaction with art.
Opening the exhibition, Vik Muniz’s faithful reproduction of the reverse of Las Meninas encourages us to make a physical and conceptual turn while establishing a connection with the unprecedented sculptural presence of the reverse of the canvas on an easel in the paintings by Rembrandt and Barent Fabritius. Those images also include items habitually found in an artist’s studio such as a mahlstick, a palette hanging from a nail and canvases turned to the wall, the latter the subject of particular attention here.
On the Reverse is on view at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid from November 7, 2023, through March 3, 2024. To learn more, click here.