Costa del Sol museum remembers American artist Robert Harvey

Nerja Museum, which belongs to the Cueva de Nerja Foundation on the eastern stretch of the Costa del Sol, is opening a new temporary exhibition to commemorate the life of the American artist Roberty Harvey who lived in the Axarquía for many years. The exhibition coincides with the centenary of the birth of the artist who lived in Frigiliana and Macharaviaya in the Axarquía.

The exhibition, ‘Robert Harvey, One Hundred Years’ will run from Thursday 19 September until 17 November in the museum’s Sala Ana María Márquez Hall and is free of charge.

The exhibition includes 23 acrylics and eight engravings by Harvey. It is a retrospective in which pieces from different years have been selected, “from 1973 to 2003, just one year before Harvey's death”, according to a press release from the Cueva de Nerja foundation.

“They are creations marked by the painter's unique style, where he reflects a dreamlike, somewhat intangible space, in which he reveals, blurs and suggests at the same time. Between the frames he traps a halo of mystery and creates works that go beyond time with ochre, green, grey tones. He draws silhouettes of people, of natural elements, of inanimate objects, all with one thing in common: immateriality, the veiled, the concealed. Harvey manifests and conceals at the same time. And so, he conceives works that trap and question the spectator, that create transcendence,” the foundation highlighted in a press statement.

Harvey was born in Lexington, North Carolina, on 16 September 1924. From the age of six, it was clear to him that he ‘already was’ a painter when he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. Thus, with such a clear vocation at such an early age, he began studying fine art in 1942, at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida.

In 1944 he moved to New York and began working at the House of Heydenryk, a Dutch frame manufacturer through which he met numerous European artists who had come to America in those years to escape Nazi Europe. This sparked his interest in Europe and in travelling. His first solo exhibition was in 1948 in New Mexico. In this way doors opened for him and dreams came true getting exhibitions in well-known international galleries.

In 1971 Harvey moved to Spain for good, choosing the Axarquía, where he rented a house in Frigiliana and bought an orchard in Macharaviaya. For this reason, the director of the Nerja Museum, Juan Bautista Salado, has defined him as “American by birth, but ‘Axarqueño’ by life and heart”.

The opening is taking place on Thursday 19 September at 7pm and is open to the public.