Exhibition «Ubu painter. Alfred Jarry and the arts»

The exhibition brings together more than a century of resonances around this writer, who lived as if his own life were part of the work. Illustrated books, drawings, manuscripts and original pieces coexist with works by Bonnard, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Filiger, Rouault and the Nabis, witnesses to an era in which literature and art freely contaminated one another. At the same time, his mark on the avant-gardes unfolds: the Surrealists — from Breton to Miró — recognised him as one of their most unsettling and lucid forebears.

One of the most revealing moments of the tour is the appearance of Picasso, who transformed Ubu into an allegory of the modern dictator in Dream and Lie of Franco. Also notable is the influence of the Collège de Pataphysique, which turned Jarry’s delirious «science of imaginary solutions» into an intellectual laboratory that still fascinates today.

The exhibition opens up to the present with works by William Kentridge, who revisits the figure of the Jarryesque despot to show its unsettling relevance today. It culminates with a reading of the Catalan reception of this Ubu-like universe, where irreverence, fantasy and fierce criticism found fertile ground.