Lecture cycle Trompe l’oeil: between reality and fiction

The cycle comprised five lectures to be given by the exhibition’s curators: Mar Borobia, chief curator of Old Master Painting at the museum; Guillermo Solana, the museum’s artistic director; the French painter Claude Yvel; Benito Navarrete, senior professor of art history at the Universidad de Alcalá; and Leonore van Sloten, the curator of the Rembrandt House Museum.

Their lectures focused on themes such as the additional meaning underlying Baroque still lies; the work of the group of 20th-century French artists known as Trompe-l’oeil/Réalité; compositions by modern painters affiliated with contemporary realist trends; the oeuvre of Samuel van Hoogstraten, one of the key figures in the development of the trompe l’oeil in northern Europe; and the resources that artists working in this genre employed to achieve a remarkable ambiguity which leaves the viewer in doubt as to what they see.