Tag: spain

Juan Adán Morlán

Juan Adán Morlán, “Luchadores de Florencia (Wrestlers of Florence)”, 1773, Terra Cotta, 36 x 40 x 28 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Born in March of 1741 in Tarazona, a provincial town of Zaragoza, Juan Adán Morlán was a Spanish painter and sculptor. The son of Juan and Manuela Morlán, he was baptized at the local parish church, Iglesia Parroquial San Pedro Apóstol, located in the town of Buenache de Alarcón. 

Juan Adán moved with his family around 1755 to Zargoza, the provincial capital, where he entered the workshop of Baroque architect and sculptor José Ramírez de Arellano. After being appointed sculptor to King Carlos III in 1740, José Ramírez had been commissioned in 1751 to oversee the work done at the capital’s Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar. Once the works at the Cathedral were finished in 1765, Juan Adán at the age of twenty-four traveled to Rome.

Juan Adán Morlán lived on the resources he had saved from his work at the Basilica until they were exhausted. He then approached Tomas de Azpuru y Jiménez, a native of Zaragoza and the appointed Charge d’Affaires of Spain who oversaw King Carlos III’s business in Rome. Through Jiménez’s assistance, Juan Adán received several commissions for work in Rome. Among these were sculpturing a copy of Camilo Rusconi’s 1718 marble “Saint John the Evangelist” and a drawing that was later presented to Francisco Preciado de la Vega, a scholar elected both prince and secretary of the Academy of Artists, as well as, an Arcade of the College of Roman Arcades.

Juan Adán was granted a pension from the government in October of 1767 and began work on new commissions in Rome. In 1773, he created his terracotta “Luchadores de Florencia (Wrestlers of Florence)” and sent it to the Academic Board in Rome which extended his pension. In the following year, Juan Adán created his “Compassio Mariae”, a terracotta sculpture of the Virgin Mary supporting the body of the dead Christ. This technical exercise was sent that same year to the Academy as a pensioner’s work. 

In January of 1775, Juan Adán Morlán was appointed an Academic of Merit at the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome. He reproduced his “Compassio Mariae” again in 1791 for the church of the Royal College of Pious Schools of San Fernando. For this, Juan Adán was appointed Academic of Merit of Saint Fernando. He returned to Spain in 1776, where the Lérida Cathedral council commissioned him to work in the city until 1782. During Juan Adán’s stay in Lérida, construction work authorized by King Carlos III was still proceeding at the new Cathedral of Lérida that would serve as a  replacement for abandoned Cathedral of St. Mary of la Seu Vella,. 

Juan Adán stayed in the province of Granada from 1783 to 1786, where he worked at a chapel in the city of Cámenes. He returned in 1783 to the king’s court in Madrid where he was appointed lieutenant-director of Sculpture under the directorship of Isidro Carnicero, who rose to his position upon the death of director Roberto Michel. In May of 1793, Juan Adán received the appointment of Chamber Sculptor to King Carlos IV, a honor which became effective in February of 1795. 

In 1795, Juan Adán Morlán sculpted the busts of Carlos IV and his wife Maria Luisa of Parma, the youngest daughter of Philip, Duke of Parma and fourth son of Philip V of Spain. Numerous portrait commissions at this time were made by the nobility; among these was the 1794 portrait of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, Duke of Alcudia. In 1807, Juan Adán Morlán made the Relief of San Miguel at his chapel inside the Cathedral of Granada and, in the following year, created the Anteo Fountain in the gardens of Aranjuez. 

Juan Adán was appointed in 1811 the Director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando. In 1815, he became Chamber Sculptor to King Fernando VII who, after the defeat of the French invasion, was again legally recognized by the 1813 Treatry of Valençay as King of Spain.. A year after his royal appointment, Juan Adán Morlán died in Madrid on the 14th of June in 1816. He was buried in the Puerta de Fuencarral Cemetery in Madrid.

Top Insert Image: Juan Adán, “Manuel Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, Duke of Alcudia”, 1794, Marble, 72 x 53 x 35 cm, Real Academia de Belles Artes de San Fernando, Spain

Second Insert Image: Juan Adán Morlán, “Moisés (Moses)“, 1775, Terracotta, 67 x 32 x 30 cm, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Third Insert Image: Juan Adán, “San Juan Evangelista (St. John the Evangelist)“, 1767, Terracotta, 70 x 40 x 28 cm, Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid

Bottom Insert Image: Juan Adán Morlán, “Priamo y Hector (Priam and Hector)”, 1770s, Terracotta, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Gori Mora

The Artwork of Gori Mora

Born in 1992 in Mallorca, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, Gori Mora is a painter who currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2011, he moved to Barcelona where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Barcelona University. Mora relocated to Glasgow in 2017 to study the Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. After the completion of his Master’s program, he was awarded a John Kinross Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh to spend research time in Florence. Mora’s 2018 project “My Florence Souvenir” is now part of the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh collection.

The focus of Gori Mora’s work is the exploration of the myriad effects that technology has on our social interactions, our intrinsic values, and our self-identification. Through examining human interactions on social networks, the roles and eroticism involved and the current trends of the platforms, Mora explores in his paintings both the queer community’s history and the heightened effect that technology has on the nature of desire.

Mora’s compositions, systematic arrangements of stylized objects and figures, are painted in oils on the reverse side of transparent plastic sheets made of polymethyl methacrylate. The prominent figures and objects in the front layer are painted first with subsequent layers of background added later to increase the depth of the image. The finished work is viewed from the smooth, unpainted side of the perspex sheet, with the thickness of that sheet creating a curious sense of depth to the image. 

In Gori Mora’s work, parts of his scenes are sectioned off with screens or framed within mirrors that offer perspectives seen from different angles. Many of the male figures are portrayed either complete or fragmented in form and often shown in various states of repose. Objects seen everyday, such as socks, belts, glasses, smoking cigarettes and electronic devices, are carefully arranged throughout most of his images. In Mora’s work, there is a strong sense of illustrative graphic design seen in his balanced compositions, stylized forms, and use of background patterns. 

Mora had his first solo exhibition in Spain in March of 2022, entitled “Layering Intimacy” at the Galeria Pelaires in Mallorca. His work has been shown in such group exhibitions as the MUTUO Cultural Art Center in 2015, the 2015 “Konvent Punt Zero” held at Barcelona’s Centre Cultural d’Art, the Museu de Porreres in Majorca in 2017, the Casa de Cultura de Felanitz in Majorca in 2019, the 2019 TRAMWAY exhibition in Glasgow, the 2020 “V2React” exhibition in Miami, BEERS London Gallery in 2021, The Royal Scottish Academy exhibition in 2021, and the Tuesday to Friday Gallery in Valencia in 2022, among others.  

Note: Reverse painting on glass is an historic art form. It has been popular in Europe since ancient times; glass painted using this technique has even been found in Assyrian and Phoenician civilizations. Qualified as a “scientific art”, reverse glass painting reached its peak during the Renaissance period when it had widely influenced art in Venice, Italy. It was favored since the eighteenth-century by the Church and nobility throughout Central Europe and was widely used for sacred paintings and icons in the Byzantine Empire.

The technique was used by the middle of the nineteenth-century on folk art from Bohemia and Bavaria, and such commercial products as clock faces. By the middle of the twentieth-century, the technique of reverse painting had fallen out of fashion and nearly disappeared. With the creation and rapid rise in use of polymer glazing, new paint compositions were made by combining oil and acrylic paints that made reverse painting possible on these supports. 

Gori Mora’s Instagram site can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/gori.mora/?hl=en

Second Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Smoke & Sand”, 2020, Oil on Perspex, 115 x 70 cm

Third Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Reverie”, 2021, Oil on Perspex, 101 x 105 cm

Jesús Carrillio

Paintings by Jesús Carrillio

Born in the Andalusian town of Córdoba, Jesús Carrillio is a Spanish multi-media artist who also uses the name Eltío Esse. He works in the fields of painting, photography, computer graphics and film making, Interested in drawing and color from an early age, Jesús Carrillio received his initial lessons in art from his older brother, the painter José Maria Carrillio. 

At the age of sixteen,  Jesús Carrillio attended the Priego Landscape School where he did landscape painting influenced by the school’s impressionistic style. His formal art training began at Granada’s Padre Suárez Institute where he studied art history, art theory, and aesthetics. In 1990, Carrillio attended the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Granada, where he majored in painting.

After graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Jesús Carrillio moved in 1995 to the seaside city of Brighton, England, where he painted and worked as a postman. Three years later, he moved to Salamanca, Spain, where he enrolled in its University to study design and both audiovisual and multimedia techniques. Influences on Carrillio’s expressionistic work are the Italian and Flemish paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , and his attraction to African culture and art.

Carrillio often uses computer software to enhance his painted images. Both his film and video art, as well as his unique animated and static GIFs,  are designed to be viewed as projections at performances and installation projects. Carrillio’s photographic work and digital paintings are printed on brushed aluminum panels, a process in which, while darker areas of the image appear matte, the lighter areas of the image have a unique shimmer.

More information on Jesús Carrillio’s work, including commissioned pieces and contact information, can be found at his Artfinder site located at: https://www.artfinder.com/artist/eltioesse/

Francesc Català-Roca

Photography by Francesc Català-Roca

Born in  in Valls, Tarragona, in March of 1922, Francesc Català-Roca was a Spanish photographer, the first of a brilliant generation of photographers to emerge in the post-civil war era of 1950s Spain.

After the Spanish Civil War, during Franco’s dictatorship, Català-Roca travelled extensively throughout Spain. An eye witness to the changes that slowly transformed the country, he frequented groups of artists and intellectuals, with whom he influenced and exchanged ideas. Having embraced the neorealist photography of the time, Català-Roca is best known for his documentary images of Spain  and for his portraits of contemporary artists and intellectuals. 

Francesc Català-Roca started his apprenticeship at the age of thirteen in the photographic studio of his father, Pere Català Pic , a writer and a representative of Catalan avant-garde movement. At an early age, he established a studio as a portraitist and, in 1948, worked independently as a photojournalist for magazines such as “Destino” and “La Vanguardia”. Executed predominately in a black and white, minimalist style, Català-Roca’s photography dealt with a variety of themes from landscapes to cityscapes, and artistic documentation to ethnography

Català-Roca’s first photographic book, published in 1952, portrayed one of Spain’s most famous creations, the Sagrada Familia designed by Antoni Gaudi, the famous Catalan architect. In 1954 he had his first exhibition of his black and white work. In the same year,  Català-Roca  was commissioned to illustrate books by Luis Romero and Juan Antonio Cabezas on Barcelona and Madrid, respectively. 

These two commissions enabled Francesc Català-Roca to show his vision of these cities. His many images of Barcelona, with which he had a direct connection, reflect a sophisticated city working to modernize itself; while the images of 1950s Madrid are characterized by its post-war poverty. Repeatedly throughout his career, Català-Roca explored not only the busiest city streets but explored the more obscure areas, such as he did with Barcelona’s Barrio Chino and the shantytowns that surrounded the city.

Català-Roca’s oeuvre contains two hundred thirty-one thousand works, published in over one thousand books, of which eighty are photo-albums. In addition to his books, he directed  films of which the best known are the 1952 “Piedras Vivas”, a documentary about the Holy Family which won first prize at Italy’s Festival of Ancona in the same year; the 1958 “Rapsodia de Sangre”, a film of a young pianist whose concert becomes a slogan in the demonstrations against the 1956 invasion of Hungary; the 1966 short film “Tierra de Conquistadores”; and the 1969 “Ditirambo”, a tragic story of an atypical hero whose life changes unexpectedly.

Francesc Català-Roca also made documentaries on such famous artists as painter Joan Miró, abstract painter Josep Guinovart, and monumental public sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Català Roca passed away, after a long and fruitful career full of merits and awards, on March 15, 1998 in Barcelona . In 1998, a homage to his work was presented by Barcelona’s Primavera Fotográfica and, in May of 2000, an extensive retrospective was held in Barcelona’s La Fundación Joan Miró.

Tope Insert Image: Francesc Català-Roca, Title and Date Unknown, (Viewers), Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Francesc Català-Roca, Self-Portrait in Park Güell, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print 

Bottom Insert Image: Francesc Català-Roca, Barcelona, 1950, Gelatin Silver Print

Oscar Santasusagna

The Artwork of Oscar Santasusagna

Born in Barcelona in 1973, Oscar Santasusagna is a self-taught Spanish artist who began drawing and painting at an early age. The style and techniques of his work have been influenced by the many artists he has studied, including illustrators and painters Andrew and Newell Conners Wyeth; narrative painter Hernan Bas, best known for his scenes of dandies and waifs; painter and draftsman David Hockney; and printmaker and landscape painter Winslow Homer, among others.

Santasusagna believes that a well-executed painting must make a connection with the viewer and produce an emotional response. His work is narrative in style, with each painting accompanied by  a poem or text that relays a personal message to the viewer. The source of these messages are derived from either a song heard, an image seen, or a personal  experience he has had. The subjects most often presented in Santasusagna’s work are the issues of loneliness, friendship, freedom and equality, homosexuality, and man’s relationship to the natural world.

Since 2015, Oscar Santasusagna has exhibited his paintings at many solo exhibitions throughout Spain. These include his 2015 exhibition “Desperta de la Realitat” and his 2016 “Apunts Dispersos” , both of which were held at Barcelona’s Galeria Moraima. In 2018, Santasusagna had a solo exhibition, entitled “Wanderlust”, at the Galeria Departure located in Barcelona and, in 2021, an exhibition in the United States,  entitled “Fables Keeper”, at the Contemporanco Art Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina.

Santasusagna has exhibited in several collective exhibitions, including  the 2015 Seleccio d’Artistes held at Galeria Escolà in Barcelona, the 2021 Una Mirada LGBTI+ exhibition held at the Taller Balam Gallery in Barcelona, and the 2021 Fundació Barcelona Olimpica, where he won third prize for his painting “Sempre hay un Comienso para cada Historia”. He  has also been finalist at the Sanvicens Painting Contest in Sitges, the Concurs FMPC held in Tarragona, and the annual Premium Painting Contest held in the city of Centelles.

Oscar Santasusagna collaborated with theater playwright Bill Lattanzi on his musical comedy production “Jenny Must Die”, which was premiered at the Providence, Rhode Island, Fringe Festival in 2020. He also painted the book cover illustration for “Projecto Wemen”, published by Madrid’s Editorial Silex in 2018. Santasusagna’s paintings on in many private collections in Spain, Belgium, Canada and the United States.

Top Insert Image: Oscar Santasusagna, “Ode for Tenderness”, 2015, Acrylic on Paper 

Oscar Santasusagna’s work can be found at his website located at https://www.santasusagna.com and at https://www.flickr.com/photos/santasusagna .

Enrique Toribio

Enrique Toribio, Red Series, Limited Edition Series, Model Unknown

Enrique Toribio is a Spanish photographer who currently lives and works in Madrid. He studied Design at Madrid’s School of Arts and Crafts and later earned a degree in Industrial Pattern Design. Since the mid-1980s, Toribio has been involved in couture costume design for theatrical productions of work by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Tennessee Williams. He has also designed costumes for cabaret and dance productions, both Spanish and classical. 

Beginning in 2003, Toribio has concentrated on his photography with an emphasis in figurative and portraiture work. Particularly interested in the aesthetic treatment of body and facial expressions and textures, he endeavors to recreate the appearance of mid-twentieth century photography with the use of digital technology.

Enrique Toribio has participated in several international photography exhibitions, including the Second Great LGBT Photo Show at Leslie & Lohman in New York City, and multiple exhibitions in Spain, including “ABRAZOS” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Conde Duque in Madrid. He has received recognition for his work at Argentina’s FotoRevista competitions in both 2017 and 2018, and received Third Prize at FotoRevista in February of 2018. Toribio’s work has also appeared in several digital photographic magazines and has been included in Joris Buiks’ 2011 phtotographic anthology “Turnon: Tattos”, published by Bruno Gmunder.

Enrique Toribio’s photographic work is available through Saatchi Art: https://www.saatchiart.com/etoribio

The artist’s website is located at:  https://etoribio.com

 

Gabriel Morcillo Raya

The Paintings of Gabriel Morcillo Raya

Born in Granada, Spain, in February of 1887, Gabriel Morcillo Raya was a painter and teacher. His oeuvre is composed mainly of figurative works and landscapes influenced by Orientalism, a movement which was particularly influential in Spain, due to Spain’s exceedingly dense and complex  relations with Islamic culture.

Gabriel Raya initially studied painting under the tutorage of his aunt Paquita Raya. He later attended Granada’s School of Fine Arts, where he studied under landscape and genre painters Miguel Vico Hernández and José de Larrocha González. In 1907, Raya relocated in Madrid to continue his studies under Valencian painter and illustrator Cecilio Plá y Gallardo: however, due to financial reasons, he was impelled to return to his hometown of Granada. In 1910, Raya received a grant from the Granada Provincial Council which enabled him to travel back to Madrid for further studies. 

Raya exhibited his work during his years in Madrid and earned in 1912 an honorable mention for the work he presented at National Exhibition of Fine Arts. In the same year, he was appointed director of the Residence of Painters of the Alhambra. Two years later, Raya returned to Granada and, in 1918, was awarded a scholarship to the Academy of Painting in Rome, which he did not accept. His work began to challenge the pictorial content of the time with its more concrete detail and use of movement and color.

In 1925, Gabriel Raya became an academician of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Granada’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at San Telmo. He accepted the position as Professor of Decorative Painting and Natural Figure in 1927 at Granada’s School of Arts and Crafts, where he influenced several generations of local artists, among whom was the painter José Guerrero whose later work  became known for its chromatic masses of color, and Miguel Pérez Aguilera, whose development of his own pictorial language played an important role in contemporary Spanish art.

Raya had his first exhibition of his orientalist works in 1944 in Granada and achieved great success at exhibitions held in Buenos Aires, New York City, and Venice, Italy. During the period from  1955 to 1960,  he traveled to Madrid to paint portraits of Francisco Franco and his wife, and Admiral Carrero Blanco and other members of Madrid’s high bourgeoisie. Raya received the Silver Medal of the Red Cross, a decoration for those people whose voluntary actions supported the Spanish Red Cross, and, in 1951, the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise for merit in the field of culture. 

Gabriel Morcillo Raya passed away in Granada in December of 1973, at the age of eighty-five. Several of his works, including the 1916 “Dwarf El Puerto Real”, can be seen in the collection of Granada’s Museum of Fine Arts. 

Note: An interesting article on the orientalist movement is “Editorial: Spain and Orientalism” by Anna McSweeney and Claudia Hopkins which is located at Taylor & Francis Online:  https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2017.1316039

Insert Images: 

Gabriel Morcillo Raya, “Muchachos”, Initial Stucy, Date Unknown, Watercolor on Paper, 57 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Gabriel Morcillo Raya, “Self Portrait”, Date Unkonw, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Francisco Brines: “The Cause of Love”

Photographers Unknown, The Cause of Love

When they have asked me the cause of my love
I have never answered: You already know its great bearuty.
(And there are still more beautiful faces.)
Nor have I described the certain qualities of his spirit
that he always showed me in his customs,
or in readiness for silence or smile
as required by my secret.
They were things of the soul, and I said nothing about her.
(And I should still add that I have met higher souls.)
The fruit of my love now I know:
man’s imperfections overcome his presence,
it is atrocious to think
that bodies do not correspond to souls in us,
and so the grace of the spirit blinds bodies,
its clarity, the aching flower of experience,
goodness itself.
important events that we never discovered,
or we find out late.
The bodies lie, other times, an airy heat,
moved light, honda freshness;
and the damage reveals its dry falsehood to us.
Know the truth of my love now:
matter and breath joined in his life
like the light that falls on the mirror
(it was a small light, a tiny mirror);
It was a perfect random creation.
A being in order grew next to me,
and my disorder was serene.
I loved its limited perfection.

–Francisco Brines, Cause of Love

Born in Oliva, Valencia, in January of 1932, Francisco Brines Bañó was a Spanish poet and essayist. He was a prominent member of the Generation of “50, a Spanish literary movement whose new literary language incorporated metaphysical and philosophical techniques to undermine the strict censorship of the Franco government.

After studying at the Jesuits of Valencia, Francisco Brines attended the University of Madrid, where he studied Philosophy and Letters, and also the Universities of Valencia, Deusto and Salamanca, where he earned a degree in Law. He became a reader of Spanish literature at the University of Cambridge and a Professor of Spanish at the University of Oxford.

Described as a metaphysical poet, Brines was highly influenced by the work of Luis Cernuda, an openly gay poet of the Generation of ’27; inspired by these works, many of Brines’s poems also convey the theme of homosexual love. His poetry is characterized by the intimate tone of his verses, the constant reflection on the passage of time and decay of the living, and observations on the condition of a human being subjected to his own limitations. Memory also plays a fundamental role in Brines’s writing; although, his poems reveal the belief that neither poetry nor memory can endure the passage of time or save the moments of the past.

Francisco Brines’s first collection of poems, entitled “Las Brasas (Embers)”, was published in 1959 and won the 1960 Adonais Poetry Prize. In 1966, Francisco Brines published “Words in the Dark”, which earned him the National Critics Award in 1967. In the same year, he also won the Valencian Literature Award. “The Autumn of Roses’, a collection of sixty poems written over a ten year period, was published in 1986 and won the National Prize for Literature. This book, in which elegies of lamentation and exaltation merge, was his most critically acclaimed work.

Entering the world of theater, Brines revised and adapted playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 1636 drama“El Alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea)”. Directed by José Luis Alonso, the play was performed by the Classical Theater Company in 1988. Told in three acts, it explored the power of a self-made man against political authority in seventeenth-century Spain,

Brines was recognized for his work by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1998 with the Fastenrath Prize and, later, received the 1999 National Prize for Spanish Letters for his poetic oeuvre. Elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language in April of 2000, Brines gave his institutional speech on the poetry of Luis Cernuda, one of the poets who influenced his work. In 2020, he won the Premio Cervantes, the most important literary award of the Spanish language world.

Francisco Brines Bañó was taken to Gandía Hospital shortly after King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia presented him with the 2020 Cervantes Prize at his family estate in Oliva, Valencia, as he was unable to attend the official ceremony due to his delicate state of health. He died on the 20th of May in 2021, at the age of eighty-one, at Gandía Hospital, after a hernia operation.

Note: An interesting article on the homoeroticism of Francisco Brines’s poetry, long regarded as an open secret but rarely acknowledged in critical studies, entitled “Francisco Brines and the Humanist Closet” by Jonathan Mathew of the University of Kansas, can be found at: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/7478/Mayhew_Francisco%20Brines.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Guillermo Martin Bermejo

The Drawings of Guillermo Martin Bermejo

Born in 1971, Guillermo Martin Bermejo is a Spanish Postwar and Contemporary artist who is currently based in a small village north of Madrid. Influenced by the works of French novelist Marcel Proust and Swiss painter and graphic artist Otto Meyer-Andem, Bermejo’s pencil drawings reference both historical paintings and literature to form a very personal world. 

Drawn in pencil on pages from second-hand notebooks and the covers of paperback books, Bermejo’s  work, although deceptively simple in composition, is woven with his own life experiences and memories. While some of his drawings are simple portraits, others portray elaborate scenes which contain the settings and the traditions of village life in the mountainous area of norther Spain. 

Guillermo Bermejo’ stylized figures, often taken from history, appear in subtly altered scenes taken from renowned artworks,  These figurative scenes act, in a visual sense, as legends in which the total story is understood only through the underlying meaning of the objects placed in the tableaux. An example of this is found in Bermejo’s 2020 “Aschenbach’s Dream”,  a drawing which relates to an interpretation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, drawn with figures from Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of the same name . 

Guillermo Martin Bermejo’s work has appeared at the 2018 exhibition at Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, the Museo Carmen Thyssea Malaga in 2017, and the 2016 exhibiton at the Fundación Santiago y Segundo Momes in Valladolid. His most recent solo exhibition , entitled “La Pleyade de la Espana Moderna”, was held in 2019-2020 at Madrid’s Museo Lázaro Galdiano. Bermejo also exhibited at the 2020 Modern and Contemporary Art Fair in London. He is  currently represented by the James Freeman Gallery in London.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid acquired a series of twelve drawings by Bremejo in 2020 for the collection. His works appear in a number of notable collections, including the Koc Collection in Istanbul, the Caja Collection in Madird, the Marine International Bureau in Mónaco, and the Spanish Embassy in Tokyo, Japan.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: “A Mystery to Man”

 

Artists Unknown, (A Mystery to Man), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

“Mientras la humanidad siempre avanzando,

No sepa a do camina:

Mientras haya un misterio para el hombre,

!Habrá poesia!”

“While humanity is always advancing,

Do not know where you are going;

As long as there is a mystery to man, 

There will be poetry!”

—Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rimas, 1871

Born in Selvill in 1836, the Spanish lyric poet Gustavo Adolfo Dominguez Bécquer is noted for his “Rimes, a collection of short lyric poems. This work had such a profound influence that it is considered the starting point of Spanish contemporary poetry.

Unlike the inflated style of his contemporaries, Bécquer’s diction was spare and simple, his verses delicate and light. Yet he achieved in each poem a maximum resonance by attending to the phonetic structure of words and by using images which affected the reader’s sensibility and demanded his active collaboration. Bécquer’s ability to make words express much more than their conventional meanings anticipated the techniques of modern symbolic poetry.

Bécquer wrote most of his prose works from 1860 to 1865. These include 22 legends, which are based upon regional folklore and exploit the supernatural. While at the monastery of Veruela in 1864, he wrote a collection of nine letters entitled “Desde Mi Celda, Cartas Literarias (From My Cell, Literary Letters)”. That same year Becquer directed an important journal and was appointed official censor of novels.

In 1868 Bécquer separated from his wife and, in the wake of the revolution that ended the rule of Isabella II, went to Paris. He returned to Madrid in 1869, rewrote from memory the lost manuscript of “Rimas”, and resumed newspaper writing. The sudden death of his brother Valeriano in September of 1870 severely depressed Bécquer, and he died only 3 months later, on December 22nd, exhausted by tuberculosis. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s collected works were published posthumously in 1871.

 

Miguel Viladrich Vila

Miguel Viladrich Vila, “Arab with Goat”, 1933, Oil on Canvas

Miguel Viladrich Vila was born in Torrelameu, Catalonia, Spain in 1887. In his early life, he studied architecture in Barcelona. Receiving a scholarship in 1907, Vila moved to Madrid and dedicated himself to painting. He traveled throughout Spain with sculptor Julio Antonio, sketching and painting gypsies and women wearing traditional costume. Vila went to Paris in 1909 and then onto Florence and Rome, studying the works of Botticelli and da Vinci. In 1910, Vila took part in Madrid’s National Exhibition of Fine Arts, entering his symbolist painting “My Funerals Presided Over by Death”.

Returning to Madrid, Vila frequented the New Cafe Levante, a gathering place for intellectuals, including the Spanish writer and dramatist Gomez de la Serna and painter Romero de Torres. In 1911, Vila produced his four painting series of “Gypsy of Seville”. Traveling with his friend and sculptor Julio Antonio, Vila met Catalan artist Anglada Camarasa, who helped both the artists with financial support. Villa exhibited works at the Annual Salon in Paris, selling works for the first time to Spanish and North American collectors.

Miguel Viladrich Vila travel as his reputation grew, throughout Spain, France, Italy and South America. While in Argentina he met Ana Morera, a painting teacher, whom he married in 1919. A trip to New York in 1926 resulted in the sale of thirty-six oil paintings to art patron Archer Milton Hutington, who established the first Hall of the Hispanic Society of America. In the decade of the 1930s, Vila traveled regularly to Morocco, painting a series of Moorish figures and tradesmen. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1940, where he remained until his death in 1956.

Images reblogged with thanks to http://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

David Agenjo

Paintings by David Agenjo

Born in Madrid, Spain, David Agenjo is a painter who lives and works in London. In the context of contemporary figurative painting, he is best known for his compelling colour palette where personal colour arrangements and interpretations take his subjects beyond realism. Throughout Agenjo’s career, he has evolved his practice from an intimate exploration of the human form, to a broader contextualisation of figures and, most recently, to still life paintings.

David Agenjo studied painting and printmaking at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from 2000 to 2006, combining his artistic practice with his profession as a graphic designer before moving to Dublin in 2007 as an independent artist. Three years later he moved to London, establishing his studio in an artist community, where he still lives and works. Agenjo has worked with galleries in major cities such as Dublin, London and New York and his paintings and private commissions have been auctioned and sold to collectors worldwide. He has been awarded artist residencies in Shenzhen, China (2013) and Mumbai (2015). David Agenjo’s site: https://davidagenjo.com.

José Villegas Cordero

José Villegas Cordero, “Self-Portrait”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, Museo National del Prado

José Villegas Cordero was a Spainish painter of historical, genre, and costumbrista scenes. Costumbrism is the pictorial interpretation of everyday life with its customs and mannerisms. It is related both to thhe movements of Realism with its focus on precise representation and Romanticism with its interest on expression and romantic styling.

José Cordero studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Seville. In 1867 he traveled to Madrid and worked in the studios of Federico de Madrazo. copying the works of Valazquez to perfect his technique. Codero visited Rome in 1868 where he first created his costumbrista works.

Santiago Calatrave

Santiago Calatrave, “Auditorio de Tenerife”, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary islands, Spain

The auditorium was designed by architect Santiago Calatrava who publicly presented his design in 1991. After site location changes and bureaucratic delays, construction began in 1997. The auditorium complex was finally completed in 2002.

The main hall or Symphony, crowned by a dome, has 1,616 seats in an amphitheater. The chamber hall, with 422 seats, reproduces the symphony hall amphitheater on a smaller scale. Much of the exterior srufaces are covered with white trancadis, mosaics made from cemented tile shards and broken chinaware. Colored trancadis act as decorative elements in the retaining walls of the plaza.

The building is famous for its great arc, which marked a first in the history of architecture. It is the only large arch supported by only two points, whose tip appears to be suspended, defying gravity.

Reblogged with thanks to https://oznagni.tumblr.com

Spencer Means, “Balcony at Casa Calvet”

Spencer Means, “Balcony at Casa Calvet”, Barcelona, Spain

Casa Calvet is a building, built between 1898 and 1900, designed by Antoni Gaudi for a textile manufacturer which served as both a commercial property and a residence. It is located at Carrer de Casp 48, Eixample district of Barcelona.

Gaudí scholars agree that this building is the most conventional of his works, partly because it had to be squeezed in between older structures and partly because it was sited in one of the most elegant sections of Barcelona. Its symmetry, balance and orderly rhythm are unusual for Gaudí’s works.

However, the curves, the double gable at the top, and the projecting oriel at the entrance are almost baroque in its drama. Modernist elements are evident in the isolated witty details. Bulging balconies alternate with smaller, shallower balconies.

Alfonso Casas Moreno

illustrations by Alfonso Casas Moreno

Alfonso Casas Moreno was born in Zaragoza, Spain in 1981 and studied teaching and later fine arr, specializing in illustration. For the last seven years, he has lived and worked in Barcelona.

Alfonso Casas has worked as an illustrator for several companies including Vodafone, Reebok, ING and others. He is the author of several books, including “Amores Minúsculos”. He is also the illustrator of “No Without My Beard” , written by Carles Suñé and published by Lunwerg Publishers in 2015. Alfonso Casas’ illustrative work has appeared on the poster for the Teatro Lara Theater  in Madrid.

Enrique Toribio

Enrique Toribio, Title Unknown

Enrique Toribio is a photographer from Madrid, Spain. Since the mid-1980s, he has worked in design and patterns in couture costume collaborations in the theater. He was also, at that time, a designer for cabaret and dance, both classical and Spanish and also for movie productions.

Since 2000 Toribio’s artistic activity focused on the universe of the image. He had an exhibition of erotic drawings entitled “Eidolon” at Berkana in 2002. His inexhaustible curiosity led him to the world of photography. Since 2003 Toribio has worked intensely as photographer specializing in portrait and figure. He is very interested in the aesthetic treatment of facial and body expression and textures.

His work can be seen in the photobook “Turnon Tattoos” by Joris Buiks published in Berlin by Bruno Gmuender Publishers in April, 2011.

The artist’s site: https://etoribio.com

Francisco de Goya

Francisco de Goya, “Vuelo de Brujas”, 1798, Oil on Canvas, Museo del Prado

“Vuelo de Brujas” or “Witches’ Flight” is an oil on canvas painting completed in 1798 by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. It was part of a series of six paintings related to witchcraft that was acquired by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna in that year. The painting decorated the Duke and Duchess’ villa, La Alameda, on the outskirts of Madrid; and eventually it was acquired by the Prado in 1999, where it is displayed today.

The general scholarly consensus is that the painting represents a rationalist critique of superstition and ignorance, particularly in religious matters and notably the violence of the Spanish Inquisition. The accusations of the religious tribunals are implicily equated with superstition and ritualized sacrifices. The donkey seen in the lower right corner is the traditional symbol of ignorance.