The Navarrese Miguel López-Remiro Forcada (Pamplona, 46 years old) will be the new director of the Picasso Museum Málaga starting next January 1. The Executive Council of the Picasso Museum Foundation announced this afternoon the appointment, which will be valid until next 2029. He will replace José Lebrero – who arrived in 2009 at the hands of Rosa Torres, then Minister of Culture of the Junta de Andalucía – and He has been chosen “for his suitability to assume this key role in the institution and based on the bases of the international competition called,” they explained from the Malaga cultural center. The announcement comes just two days after peace was signed with the workforce with the signing of a new labor agreement that puts an end to fifteen months of mobilizations. The cultural space closed 2023 with record visits: more than 779,000 people, the most visited museum in Andalusia.
López-Remiro has a degree in Economics and a doctor in Philosophy and Letters, Aesthetics and Art Theory from the University of Navarra. He has been deputy director curatorial of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, founding director of the University of Navarra Museum and curator at institutions such as the Sorigué Foundation or the Otazu Foundation. He currently served as a Doctoral Professor at the European University of Madrid in the School of Architecture, Engineering and Design and its new Creative Campus, and is editor of the first anthology of texts by Mark Rothko, published with Yale University Press and Flammarion. He will assume the duties of artistic director of the Picasso Museum Málaga on January 1 and will be presented at a press conference almost three weeks later, on January 19, with the participation of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the artist's grandson.
The appointment puts an end to a controversial process that began last spring with the publication of an international competition to fill the position that José Lebrero would vacate this year. Some of the conditions that the position included, such as a salary of 80,000 euros – almost 20,000 more than the current one – or a complement of 35,000 euros in housing assistance, outraged a good part of the staff, who had already been working for several months. protests over their working conditions. López-Remiro has been chosen among the 13 people who presented his candidacy. His arrival also marks the farewell of José Lebrero after 15 years in the direction of the center. It will not, however, be his final goodbye. Sources from the Picasso Málaga Museum have explained that the gallery is already immersed in the new 2024-2027 collection that opens in March and working on the next two temporary exhibitions, which will be curated by Lebrero.
The Picasso Málaga Museum has experienced a reality with two faces during 2023, when it celebrated its twentieth birthday. On the one hand, it has celebrated its record number of visitors with more than 779,000 — 20% more than in 2022 and 60,000 more than in 2019, the year from which its record dated — thanks to the tourism boost in the Malaga capital and the celebration of the Picasso Year on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the artist's death. The anniversary started with the exhibition Picasso sculptor. Matter and body curated by Carmen Giménez—first director of the art gallery—which closed with 151,000 visits; and then with Picasso's Echo, curated by Éric Troncy and which can still be visited until the end of March. On the other hand, it has experienced a period of labor mobilizations by the workforce, with protests and strikes that, although they have little affected the daily operation of the center, have highlighted the meager conditions of a workforce whose agreement had expired. since December 2021.
The negotiations have lasted fifteen months and this week the works council announced the signing of the new agreement. They have celebrated it little, yes, because they have achieved minimal progress with respect to previous working conditions, but they have managed to reduce the annual working day to 1,700 hours per year compared to the 1,743 of the Workers' Statute, as well as lowering the weekly working day to 37 .7 hours, when until now they had 38. Union sources have explained this week that “despite the struggle maintained for so many months and the consequent wear and tear of the workers, the working conditions” continue to place “the art gallery at the bottom of the labor of the most important and visited museums in the country.”
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