Gustavo Torner retrospective at Fundación Bancaja explores his invisible structures

Fundación Bancaja in Valencia presents 'La armonía secreta del pensamiento', a retrospective of Gustavo Torner (1925–2024), the Cuenca-born artist who co-founded the Grupo de Cuenca alongside Gerardo Rueda and Fernando Zóbel. Curated by Alicia Vallina, the exhibition features 40 works spanning 1955 to 2004, drawn from Spanish public and private collections. Torner, trained in forestry engineering, began with botanical watercolors and close-up nature photographs before moving into abstraction. He employed diverse media—painting, sculpture, collage, drawing, monotypes—often using non-artistic materials like sand, feldspar, hemp, latex, and aluminum. His compositions frequently divided canvases into a color field above and a material experimentation below, aligning him with Informalism and Nouveau Réalisme. The show is organized into four sections: geometry as mystical order, matter and void, creative transversality, and the poetics of silence. It traces his evolution from figurative beginnings to simplified late works, all rooted in meticulous observation of natural structures rather than reproduction. The exhibition runs from June 19 to September 20, 2026.