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Exhibition

Memory of a Mirage

The Pegaso sports and competition cars of the fifties

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see eleven of the Pegaso sports and competition cars created by the Barcelona engineer Wifredo Ricart in the fifties, post-war years when a ravaged Spain offered the world the image of a rural country which was equally backward in terms of economy, industry and culture. Yet despite the odds, this thoroughly discouraging context produced the Pegaso Z-102 and Z-103 sports cars, magnificent automobiles with undreamed-of technology and industrial quality for the time. The exhibition underlines the unknown aspects of this story, contrasting it with the social, economic and political situation of post-war Spain.

If the backward social, economic and political situation of post-war Spain was materialised by the faceless, overcoat-shrouded figure advertising Polil anti-moth products, the Pegaso car manufacturing company represented the counterpoint to that grey and gloomy reality of the fifties: a range of sports and competition motor cars, designed by Wifredo Ricart, which stood out for their state-of-the art design and technology in the midst of the waste land of the Francoist regime.

The Pegaso Z-102s represented a quality technological laboratory which attempted to inject a new lease of life into the incipient motor industry. This utopia became a reality in something fewer than 100 models before the government decided to halt production and concentrate its efforts on promoting the Eucharistic Congress.

Curators: Francesc Torres

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