Gonzalo Eguiguren Gallery presents the first exhibition devoted to the known oeuvre of María Josefa Sánchez Morales, one of the most enigmatic women painters of the Spanish Golden Age and the creator of an extraordinary group of painted cell crosses. These works offer some of the most distinctive evidence of private devotion in Baroque Spain.
The exhibition brings together, for the first time, a significant group of crosses signed by or attributed to the artist, making it possible to study the development of her work, her pictorial language and the iconographic variations created for different patrons. Several previously unpublished examples are among the works on display.
The exhibition is accompanied by a research project that seeks to deepen our understanding of María Josefa Sánchez Morales, who until recently was virtually absent from art-historical scholarship. It explores female authorship in early modern Spain, the devotional function of cell crosses and the artist’s possible relationship with the Castilian painter Clemente Sánchez, whose activity is documented during the same decades in which María Josefa produced her works.
Through technical, iconographic and historical analysis, the exhibition offers a new reading of these works, understood both as objects of private devotion and as material evidence of women’s participation in artistic production during the Spanish Golden Age.
The project has been developed with the collaboration of specialists Cathy Hall van del Elsen and José María Quesada, who have also contributed to the exhibition catalogue. The publication brings together new research on the artist’s known oeuvre, its religious and cultural context, and the role of women artists in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.
With this exhibition, Gonzalo Eguiguren Gallery continues its work of researching and rediscovering the artistic heritage of the Hispanic world, focusing on figures whose historical significance is only now beginning to be recognised.