'Wounded Militiaman: Rescuing an Unsalvageable Work' Exhibition
7 May 2026 – 31 December 2026 · 10:00
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, el Poble-sec, Sants-Montjuïc
Wounded Militiaman, by Francisco Mateos, is a propaganda painting conceived to denounce the brutality of the Spanish Civil War and exalt fraternity among soldiers. It was created in a context of urgency, with limited means and reused materials, with the intention of taking part in the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition, where Picasso's Guernica was also displayed. But since returning from Paris in 1938 it has never been exhibited: during Franco's dictatorship because it formed part of the silenced art of the defeated, and afterwards because it was already severely damaged. Its deterioration is irreversible and progressive, and the losses it contains make it impossible to recover its original reading. Faced with this limitation, we propose recreating what it looked like using AI-generated images, with the aim of restoring, as far as possible, the expressive force of the message the artist intended to convey. Francisco Mateos joined two of his paintings to create a larger canvas on which to depict Wounded Militiaman. This reuse, combined with the poor quality of the materials and possibly rushed work, has encouraged certain chemical reactions that cause…
Source: Ajuntament de Barcelona · checked on 8 September 2026