The Albacete Museum is exhibiting ‘La Loza de Hellín. Brillo y color’ from March 10th to August 18th. The Minister of Education, Culture, and Sports, Amador Pastor, inaugurated the exhibition on Monday in an event attended by the Vice Minister of Culture and Sports, Carmen Teresa Olmedo, among other authorities.
In his speech, Amador Pastor highlighted the significant potential of the exhibition and encouraged society as a whole, especially in the province, to «explore a fundamental journey for lovers of Spanish ceramic art.»
The exhibition showcases the history of glazed ceramic productions from the Hellín kilns from the 16th to the 19th centuries within the Spanish ceramic landscape. This type of pottery was highly esteemed and in demand, as reported by the Junta in a press release.
The workshops were located in the neighborhoods of La Cruz and San Roque, on the outskirts of the town of Hellín. Apprentices, craftsmen, and masters worked there. Families of potters such as Lozano, Zaragoza, or Padilla, among others, are known to have worked with materials like clay, lead, tin, or metallic oxides.
Hellín pottery encompassed a variety of typologies, destined for table service, personal hygiene, pharmaceutical uses, or religious service. They also produced ceramics applied to architecture, such as tiles, plaques, or glazed tiles in white or blue.
The customers included regular and secular clergy, councils, brotherhoods, members of civil society, silversmiths, sculptors, notaries, apothecaries, doctors, among other more modest social groups, always forming part of their belongings.
Decorative motifs on the pottery were varied, with botanical themes being the most abundant, along with zoomorphic figures, landscapes, architecture, heraldry, and others.
This decoration is present in the three types of pottery exhibited: bicolored pottery (blue and ocher), tricolored (blue, ocher, and manganese), and monochromatic, with cobalt blue on white taking center stage. One of the unique aspects of Hellín pottery is the presence of inscriptions, providing valuable information about aspects inherent to the culture and society of the Modern Age.
Amador Pastor emphasized that this exhibition, curated by Pascual Clemente López, reveals one of the most important ceramic centers of the Modern Age in Spain, which not only controlled the market in the old Kingdom of Murcia but also reached other neighboring kingdoms like Toledo or Valencia.
«We must be ambassadors, from today until August 31st, of the rich potential and the historical and artistic discourse we have achieved through La Loza de Hellín. We must value everything that the exhibition encompasses, as well as what has been outlined by its curator, Pascual Clemente,» Pastor affirmed.
Additionally, the Minister announced the celebration of 25 temporary exhibitions throughout the regional territory over the year, including one featuring Benjamín Palencia and Alberto Sánchez, titled ‘An Artistic Friendship,’ which will take place at the Albacete Museum in the capital of Castilla-La Mancha.