The earth and a primordial language of signs and basic forms – or, as the Carmen Thyssen Museum has defined it in this exhibition, the telluric (terrestrial or geological) and the primitive (primordial) – offered two paths of renewal starting from the very first episode in modern Spanish art (the 1920s and 1930s). Persistent and recurrent, they constitute an idiosyncratic substratum of Spanish avant-garde art that is still recognisable today.

The break with academic tradition before the Spanish Civil War and the resumption in the late 1940s of the advances interrupted by the conflict was a joint endeavour involving artists with very diverse leanings. Individuals or groups representing trends ranging from Surrealism to Art Informel and its offshoots (and beyond) relaunched artistic expression based on new avant-garde principles. To do so they turned to the earth, proposing their own ‘natural creations’ with unusual, original and surprising appearances that transcended reality. They went back to cave, indigenous and primitive art in a historical context that was pushing for a fresh start in order to rediscover a new artistic identity. It was as if Spanish art were beginning all over again, at the forefront, from the most absolute origins: the matter of which nature is made and the most ancestral signs of early human expression.

The more than sixty works brought together here – including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and prints – are shown in two sections depending on which of these leitmotifs is predominant. Nevertheless, the two approaches are continually intertwined and inseparably interwoven in this narrative, which calls for a new look at the greatest artistic renewal in Spain that lasted until the late 1900s. In these eclectic and highly evocative images with their earthy colours, sometimes saturated with matter, sometimes intensely expressive and always with a powerful personality, practitioners of the telluric and primitive trends alike turn to the atavistic, the gestural, the graphic, the organic and the dreamlike in their avant-gardist proposals, irresistibly drawn to these two driving forces of a specifically Spanish modern art.