Bartolomé Bermejo. Master of the Spanish Renaissance
Akemi Herráez Vossbrink, assistant curator of the exhibition “Bartolomé Bermejo. Master of the Spanish Renaissance” at The National Gallery, will give a lecture on the life and works of this Spanish painter.
Bartolomé Bermejo was a fifteenth-century Spanish artist whose painting technique, mixing Spanish and Netherlandish features, was unparalleled amongst his Iberian contemporaries. He had a limited output of less than twenty paintings of which seven are featured in the current National Gallery exhibition. This is the first time that six of these paintings are shown in the UK and the restoration of the National Gallery’s painting of Saint Michael Triumps over the Devil (1468) has enabled us to showcase Bermejo’s earliest masterpiece. Following the two major Bermejo retrospectives at the Prado Museum and the MNAC (Barcelona), this exhibition features paintings ranging from different periods of Bermejo’s career demonstrating his development as he moved throughout the Crown of Aragon (mostly encompassing territories in eastern Spain). This talk will focus on the seven paintings shown in the exhibition considering them within their context and retracing Bermejo’s artistic career. Bermejo’s Saint Michael, the Acqui Terme triptych and the Desplà Pietà, will receive special attention comparing the donors, their production, their intended location and the historical context.
About the speaker: Akemi Herráez Vossbrink started her Curatorial Fellowship in Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery this past July. Since then she has mainly worked on two exhibitions: Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light and Bartolomé Bermejo: Master of the Spanish Renaissance. Akemi Herráez Vossbrink, as curatorial fellow of Spanish paintings at the National Gallery, has assisted curator Letizia Treves on Bartolome Bermejo’s exhibition.She is also working on the National Gallery’s Spanish painting permanent collection updating the online catalogue, writing labels and participating in rehangs. Before starting her curatorial work, Akemi was at Cambridge University writing her PhD on the Spanish Golden Age artist Francisco de Zurbarán and his reception in Latin America. She has therefore worked on Spanish and Latin American painting and is very interested in cross-cultural exchanges. From September 2014 to August 2015, Akemi was a Graduate Intern at the J. Paul Getty Museum's Paintings Department in Los Angeles, California. In 2014 she obtained her Master by Research from the University of Edinburgh.
