The Cultura en Vena Foundation has inaugurated the exhibition ‘Art and Mental Health’ at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, which can be seen in the lobby of the art gallery from this Friday until next October 22, on the occasion of World Health Day. Mental health.
The objective is to show how art can contribute to improving people’s health and making mental health problems visible, specifically. To this end, life-size reproductions of three iconic works from the history of art digitally transformed by photographer Jorge Salgado are on display: ‘The Three Graces’, by Rubens, to address eating disorders (ED); ‘Self-portrait’, by Rembrandt, to reflect personality disorders, and ‘Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni’, by Ghirlandaio, which deals with depression.
“We want to provide these works with a specific function: to make visible and normalize aspects of mental health by proposing another perspective,” said the founder and director of the Cultura en Vena Foundation, Juan Alberto García de Cubas. “We must begin to consider the cultural sector as a true public health resource,” he added.
During the inauguration, psychiatrist Mercedes Navío, Hospital Care Manager in the Madrid Health Service, also spoke, pointing out that art “is not a healer, but a savior.” “It is savior to the extent that it represents the world, it represents all of us, and to the extent that we can feel identified, belonging, and participating, no one feels that they are outside,” the psychiatrist said.
Thus, Navío has lamented that the population tends to forget “one in four people” will have a mental health problem throughout their lives. “The differentiation between people who have it and those who don’t is an erroneous belief that feeds a taboo that is fortunately increasingly diluted,” Navío stated.
At this point, he has stressed the importance of making mental health visible from museums. “All the temples of culture are a priority when it comes to continuing to work so that the stigma and taboo that accompany mental health, fueled by prejudice, are completely destroyed,” she concluded.
A WORK ABOUT THE PRESSURE THAT IS EXERCISED ON THE BODY OF WOMEN
On the other hand, art historian Ana Folguera, cultural mediator of the ‘Art and Mental Health’ exhibition, has explained the relationship between each of the works and mental health. Regarding ‘The Three Graces’, she has pointed out that the central figure has an eating disorder and, specifically, anorexia, “a disorder that the young and adolescent population suffers with greater severity.” Folguera has stated that it is a painting that “in itself speaks a lot about the canons of Western beauty and the pressure that is exerted on women’s bodies.”
However, as a positive point, Folguera added that in this picture there is also “sorority” and “the fundamental idea of hugging, contact with other women and the collective as a very important way to alleviate the effects of the disorders of this guy”.
On the other hand, he has detailed that in Rembrandt’s ‘Self-portrait’ personality disorders are reflected “as a catalog of emotions halfway between the registration of possible gestures and the impossibility of mimetic representation that all mental illness implies, with the purpose of understand its heterogeneous nature.
Regarding ‘Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni’, Folguera has explained how this painting reflects the idea of ”four walls” that surround the protagonist, in reference to loneliness and the difficulty of leaving home when one goes through this disease. A bottle of pills and a series of brushes have also been added to the original work, in order to convey the importance of art in addressing mental pathology.