LIBRO: LA OBRA DE VÍCTOR MIRA DE DAVID CORTÉS SANTAMARTA – 2020

Author: Cortés Santamarta, David
Published by: Institución Fernando el Católico
Edition: 338 pp., 24 x 17 cm
ISBN: 978-84-9911-634-1
Year of publication: 2020

The work of Víctor Mira is dominated by an anguished pathos that reflects his existential torment. Few contemporary authors embody the paradigm of the cursed artist as he does. A status he repeatedly affirmed in his own statements, and which his suicide in 2003 would tragically confirm. Yet alongside this conflictive psychobiographical component, Mira’s creation powerfully explores established collective imaginaries. References appear to a primordial cosmogony, Christian symbolism, the conventions of pictorial genres, folk tales, and music.

This study offers a meticulous analysis of Mira’s work, investigates its semantic plurality, and provides an overall vision of the principal cycles that make up the artist’s prolific production, while also examining his varied iconographic repertoire; his links with other authors; his stylistic diversity; the genesis and origin of his visual motifs; as well as the painter’s deliberate use of the pictorial medium to reflect upon national identity itself and contemporary history.