The exhibition “Realisme social valencià en la Col·lecció Martínez Guerricabeitia” (Valencian Social Realism in the Martínez Guerricabeitia Collection) is funded by the artistic collection of the Martínez Guerricabeita Foundation desposited in the Universitat de València. This pictorial collection, curated by Pascual Patuel Chust, brings together images from the point of view of social criticism and arrived at the Universitat de València in 1999 thanks to the donation of its collector and patron, Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia. Showing it in Castelló de la Plana implies sharing a sample of university heritage that is more critical and less complacent with many aspects of contemporary reality.
The works in this exhibition tackle with imagination and a critical sense a series of social and political issues that concerned the Valencian reality at a very specific moment: when it was fighting for the implementation of political freedoms, freedom of expression or the questioning of certain humiliating practices in various areas of Valencian society, among other aspects of this nature. All this was reflected in a wide field of artistic experimentation; in such a way that, as never before, it has been possible to visualize it through its images captured in paintings, woodcuts, engravings, drawings, photographs, etc.., an imaginary where the purest social criticism, between irony and sarcasm, the censorship of facts and attitudes and the denunciation of reprehensible or at least questionable behaviour took place in Valencian society on the part of artistic groups and individuals who bet, with great rotundity, for a more progressive and democratic society in the hard years of late Francoism.
