Wandering Wednesday - VI

The weather didn't look great this morning so we thought that our Wandering Wednesday would be postponed... until Jaime happened to talk to his Mom. She was at the TEA in Santa Cruz and said we should check it out sometime... so, we decided that time was today.

The TEA, or The Tenerife Espacio de Las Artes, is the "local" contemporary art museum. The museum opened in October of 2008 and it is a beautiful building designed by the prestigious architects Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Virgilio Gutiérrez. Herzog & de Meuron have done many notable projects, one of them being the Olympic Stadium in Beijing. The museum houses several exhibition halls, a library, a photography center and different common areas: an assembly hall, a gift/book shop, a cafe, and semi-covered plaza.

Above are a few pictures of the interior of the building (the cafe, the library from the outside and the library from the inside), and also a picture of their "fancy" biblio guagua, or book bus. "Guagua" is the local Canary term for an autobús or bus.

Anyhow, the permanent TEA collection is divided into three sections. One dedicated to Óscar Domínguez, the most international artist to come out of Tenerife and of which the Cabildo (Island Government) has the largest collection in the world. There is another more wide ranging exhibition, where you can see the development of Canarian Art over the 20th century through selected works from their most outstanding artists. And the last section covers works by artists from 1975 who have made significant contributions to international art.

The current temporary exposition features Roland Penrose, an English Surrealist painter and poet, best known for his exhibitions and books on the work of his friends Picasso, Ernst, Miró, Man Ray, and Tàpies.

I think we enjoyed the museums architecture and design the most, but we did find several pieces of "Art" that we liked as well. Overall, we preferred the permanent installation the work of Penrose which we did not find all that impressive. The boys seemed to agree.

I think the TES is well worth a visit, and, if they have another exposition that looks interesting, I think we would definitely venture back!

"Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in."
~Amy Lowell