UNTIL SUNDAY 28/1
F. BANCAJA. Pl. Tetouan, 23
In it 25 anniversary of his death, The Bancaja Foundation recovers the work of one of the Spanish painters with the greatest international projection. Antonio Saura was part of the El Paso Group, a collective of artists in their thirties—many of them self-taught like Saura—who helped define the postwar Spanish avant-garde by opening up to experimentation and renouncing limiting canons.. But this journey through the six decades of the artist's career begins before the founding of El Paso, with a fleeting approach to surrealism very evident in works that evoke Dalí. He traveled to Paris to join the surrealist group and meet André Bretón, but he ended up separating himself from it when he discovered with displeasure that the French movement looked towards antiquity. He went through a stage of psychic automatism (consists of releasing the unconscious to reflect the inner world), He opted for the gestural style to create abstract works in black and white and finally embraced the structure, the human figure, specifically of women, that develops in large series. He achieved different results by repeating the same archetypes over and over again., whether they were ladies, crowds portraits, nudes or crucifixions. He alternated clean compositions, simple and schematic with the cumulative and expansive baroque that reaches its climax in its multitudes composed of beings that dissolve in the mass. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko began as references, but then Goya and Velázquez arrived to bring out the existential anguish, that tragic vein of a Spanish painter that he renounced but that, according to the co-curator of the exhibition Fernando Castro Flórez, existed. He applied gestural painting to traditional Spanish figures and themes, trying to take away from Franco's culture a legacy that he wanted to appropriate.. He constantly dialogued with the Spanish pictorial tradition, For example, reviewing the Crucifixion of Velázquez or Goya's Dog, an iconic and unique work for him that is part of his imagined portraits, dedicated to Philip II, Rembrandt o Dora Maar. All of them can be seen at Antonio Saura. Essential next to The three Graces that the Bancaja Foundation has just added to its collection. Total, 85 works from the Reina Sofía museum in which black and white predominate that review the pictorial and theoretical legacy of Antonio Saura (1948-1997), one of the great pillars of 20th century Spanish art. S.M.
