“He wanted to paint above all else and he painted what he wanted, on the edge of the knife, with perseverance and rigor.” The painter Antonio Saura (1930-1998) said the phrase when he was once asked how he wanted to be remembered. And the truth is that the artist, who died 25 years ago, managed to offer a unique career in Spain, with wide international impact, from his beginnings until almost his death. A unique chronicle on which the Bancaja Foundation has offered a great retrospective since yesterday, almost six decades of creation, with that evolution from surrealism to automatism that has marked the profile of this painter.
The Antonio Saura exhibition. Esencial is celebrated coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the artist’s death and is part of the special programming to mark the tenth anniversary of the new Bancaja Foundation. The set of 87 works that make up the exhibition reviews the legacy of Antonio Saura through his plastic creation with the presence of paintings, drawings and graphic works, dated between 1948 and 1997, which are presented accompanied by some of his writings in which reveals numerous keys to his painting and that become an indispensable element for the interpretation of an artist who defended the complementarity between the art of painting and the art of writing.
The exhibition brings together 85 works from the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, some of which are unpublished, and was presented by the president of the Bancaja Foundation, Rafael Alcón, accompanied by the curators of the exhibition, Lola Durán and Fernando Castro, together with the head of exhibitions at the Reina Sofía Museum, Rosario Peiró. These are works that the artist had kept throughout his life because he considered them important references in the history of his painting. Added to these pieces are the works Foule, from the Caja Rural de Aragón Foundation, and The Three Graces, which the Bancaja Foundation shows to the public for the first time in this exhibition after the recent addition to its art collection.
He is an artist who showed an early interest in art when a long illness forced him to remain immobilized for several years. The exhibition shows some of the works of his youth. “At that moment, the illness could have been a catalyst for something that was already living inside him. He spoke of loneliness, of isolation. In the five years that he remained in a cast from the waist up, his only company was music, books,” he recalled. Durán. For his part, Castro added that “he was someone who was able to dialogue with himself. His passion for the dreamlike, his approach to surrealism has a lot to do with dreams, of a teenager who cannot do what people his age do.”
With surrealism as a source of inspiration, he created his Constellations and Landscapes at the end of the 1940s, which were exhibited in the Libros room in Zaragoza in 1950 and in the Buchholz gallery in Madrid a year later. Alcón valued that “he is one of the greats of the most international Spanish art of the 20th century.” He was seduced by the surrealism that he painted before knowing this movement and moved to Paris to meet this current, where he did not find what he was looking for but created his ‘Phenomena’ and ‘Grattages’. “He realizes that the French surrealist movement, in his opinion, looks back, towards antiquity,” according to Durán. For this reason, he leaves a year and a half later.
The selection of works shows his evolution towards automatism, coinciding with his stay in Paris, with the creation of his Phenomena and Grattages, in the workshop he shared with Simon Hantaï in 1954 and 1955. The exhibition tour progresses in a review of his iconography which he organized into genres: Ladies, Nudes, Crucifixions, Heads, Imaginary Portraits and Crowds, in addition to other cumulative genres such as Accumulations, Cathedrals, Cocktail-parties, Montages, Mutations, Repetitions and Puzzles.
Fernando Castro also explained that the exhibition vindicates the El Paso group headed by Saura, and that it was “a shock to Spanish art in the 1950s.” “There has not been a generation in Spanish art that had so much international presence,” according to the curator, before pointing out that these artists, far from seeking a stylistic unity, “were looking for a space of freedom through art.”
Saura’s work “does not have a decorative character but rather a murky and disturbing one” and reflects an “existential anguish”, but Castro believes that, although in its time it was somewhat misunderstood by Spanish critics – until the international one gave it its support – , it will not be difficult for the visitor to enter and understand it.
For this purpose, it has also been accompanied by writings from Saura himself. “We are seeing more and more of Saura, through his complete writings, as an incredible thinker about the arts” and “one of the great thinkers about art in the Spanish language,” highlighted the curator.
The exhibition is completed with the screening of the documentary Epilogue: Antonio Saura, provided by Movistar Plus. The audiovisual piece includes an in-depth interview with the artist, conducted on July 16, 1998 in Saura’s own house.
The Antonio Saura exhibition. Esencial can be visited at the headquarters of the Bancaja Foundation in València (Plaza Tetuán, 23) from September 15 to January 28, 2024. Coinciding with the exhibition, a catalog has been published that includes the reproduction of the works on display accompanied by texts by the commissioners.
Within the cultural and artistic mediation program, the Bancaja Foundation will offer free educational workshops linked to the exhibition and aimed at schoolchildren, people with functional diversity and people at risk of social exclusion, as well as commented visits for the general public and groups led by an expert specialist in art and cultural mediation.
