PROPUESTA PARA UNA COLECCIÓN. GENERACIÓN DE LOS 80

MIQUEL BARCELÓ, JOAN BROSSA, JOSÉ MANUEL BROTO, MIGUEL ANGEL CAMPANO, FERRAN GARCÍA SEVILLA, XAVIER GRAU, MENCHU LAMAS, ANTÓN LAMAZARES, VÍCTOR MIRA, MANOLO QUEJIDO
01.08 - 20.09.1998
The Galería Miguel Marcos presents in this exhibition an extensive collection of paintings selected from the gallery’s holdings, all of them first-rate works illustrating the decade of the 1980s, a period that marked the return to painting and color in contrast to the conceptual commitment of the 1970s. Some memorable examples had already been shown in the exhibition Los años pintados, curated by Juan Manuel Bonet, held in 1995 at the Drassanes Reials de Barcelona. In Bonet’s own words, this “painted” decade represents the third great moment in the history of twentieth-century art in our country, the other two being the 1920s, with the Parisian avant-garde, and the 1950s, with the abstract generation.

Miguel Marcos has always defended the generation evoked here, which is also his own. Seventeen artists represent it through a wide variety of styles and works. Juan Antonio Aguirre, Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Franco, and Manolo Quejidobear witness to the intensity of Madrid’s neo-figurative proposals.

At the same time, in Zaragoza and Barcelona, “painting-painting” emerged, more abstract and radical, with references to 1950s American abstraction and 1970s French painting, visible in the works of Xavier Grau and José Manuel Broto. Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, and Juan Navarro Baldeweg reached an initial maturity at the end of the 1960s. Albacete came from political figuration, from which he later broke away. Campano, trained in geometric art, approached painting-painting while in Paris. Navarro Baldeweg, one of the great names in Spanish architecture, also returned to painting and color.

Santiago Serrano developed highly personal and subtle abstract proposals in Madrid. Víctor Mira was the only painter of the generation rooted in Spain’s dark artistic tradition. Menchu Lamas, Antón Patiño, and Antón Lamazares, situated between the pictorial euphoria of the 1980s and German neo-expressionist wildness, belonged to the initial core of “Atlántica,” the first major movement of the Galician postwar art scene.

Miquel Barceló, Ferran García Sevilla, and José María Sicilia exemplify how German neo-expressionism and the Italian Transavantgarde were assimilated in Spain in a creative manner. Barceló, material and figurative; García Sevilla, a former conceptual artist who returned to painting in the early 1980s; and Sicilia, who evolved from expressionism toward a profound fascination with the sublime.