The painting and sculpture exhibition by the artists Erwin Bechtold and Franco Monti at Estudi Tur Costa opens to the public on Friday 20 June at 6:30 pm and can be visited until early September 2025.

This show pays tribute to the strength of the visual sign and to the power of form and structure as fundamental elements of art, able to transcend periods and styles. It is also an evocation of Ibiza as a creative melting pot, where artists from different backgrounds converged in the same time and place, leaving a lasting mark on the history of contemporary art.

Both artists were friends of Rafael Tur Costa in Ibiza in the second half of the twentieth century. The island was fertile ground where the European avant-garde found refuge and room to experiment. In this setting, Monti and Bechtold were part of a community of international artists who, far from the traditional circuits, explored new forms of expression shaped by the Mediterranean light, vernacular architecture and the free spirit of the place.

Let us celebrate together the echo of a quiet avant-garde that found in Ibiza a place to unfold its radical vision.

The exhibition is organised in three sections that act as territories of dialogue: matter and outline, history and present, transit and contemplation. They can be visited at Estudi Tur Costa across the two exhibition rooms (one, the former studio of Tur Costa, designed by the rationalist architect Erwin Broner, and the other, the contemporary gallery designed by the architect Marc Tur) and the garden that connects them.

Erwin Bechtold, a key figure of European abstraction, built a pictorial language of great formal rigour. In his work, white does not refer to a quality of light but to an active surface: a zone of tension, interruption and pause. Displaced forms, taut margins and material textures reveal a constant negotiation between order and deviation, between structure and trace. His link with rationalist architecture, present in his own house in Ibiza and in his artistic circle, can be felt in the constructive logic of his compositions: planes that face each other, cuts that divide, spaces that are not resolved but inhabited.

Franco Monti, for his part, brings a unique sculptural voice, born of deep contact with non-European cultures and the study of African, Mesoamerican and Oceanic art. From the 1980s onwards, his sculpture took shape in Ibiza through primary forms made of concrete pigmented with earths and oxides. Each piece is a singular object, worked with precision and a ritual character, where geometry becomes organic and matter takes on a telluric vibration. Monti reduces the sign to its essence, stripping it of ornament and moving towards a silent and forceful presence of form.