The Museu d’Art Contemporani Vicente Aguilera Cerni de Vilafamés (Macvac) is once again projecting its collection beyond the province of Castellón with an exhibition that brings together some of the most recognizable names in modern and contemporary art. The Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche (UMH) inaugurates today in the Sala Tábala of the Valona building, Gramática del Trazo, an exhibition that can be visited until January 15, 2027, and which combines holdings from the Castellón museum with works by artists linked to the Madrid-based gallery Garage Bonilla.

Curated by Rafael Bonilla, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between generations, languages, and sensibilities based on an essential element of artistic creation: the line. Understood as a gesture, trace, sign, writing, structure, or space, the stroke serves as a common thread to relate works from very different eras and to observe how an apparently elementary resource can acquire radically different meanings depending on the artist and their context.

Renowned artists

Among the authors present are Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida, Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Robert Motherwell, Dora Maar, Man Ray, and Andy Warhol. Joining them are creators such as Carmen Calvo, Concha Jerez, José María Yturralde, Soledad Sevilla, or Joan Hernández Pijuan, alongside contemporary artists associated with the Garage Bonilla curatorial project.

The proposal is structured into six conceptual nuclei: the origin of the gesture, the stroke as a wound, the line and order, the line as writing, the expanded line, and the contemporary line. Rather than following a chronological sequence, Gramática del Trazo seeks to establish correspondences between works and eras, so that historical pieces engage in dialogue with current approaches and allow for new readings of the collection.

For the Macvac, the event in Elche represents a new step in its strategy of taking its holdings to other spaces and bringing them closer to different audiences. A policy that reinforces the role of Vilafamés as one of the great hubs of contemporary art in the Comunitat Valenciana and which allows for the expansion of the reach of a collection formed over more than half a century.

The Macvac once again projects a collection of more than 800 works outside of Castellón

The museum opened its doors in 1972 in the Palau del Batlle, a 15th-century Gothic building located in the heart of the historic center of Vilafamés. Its origin is linked to art critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni, who promoted a pioneering project based on the coexistence of contemporary creation, heritage, and the rural environment. Since then, the Macvac has built its own identity and a reference collection. According to the institution's 2025 report, its holdings exceed 800 works and bring together 627 artists, figures that help to dimension the value of a museum settled in a municipality in the interior of Castellón.

That singular character explains why the museum has transcended the local scale widely and has become a cultural reference also linked to the projection of Vilafamés. Its presence in exhibitions, loans, and institutional collaborations has contributed to placing the name of the municipality in cultural circuits at both regional and national levels. The arrival now of part of its holdings at the UMH once again demonstrates that capacity for projection.

Gramática del Trazo thus turns Elche into a new showcase for a collection born in the interior of Castellón, but conceived from its beginnings with an open vocation.