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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
Free spirits: Spanish art after Franco
Franco’s socialist successors saw Spain’s cultural
regeneration as the key to recapturing the nation’s
identity and vigour. So, contemporary art was fostered
with a veritable knees-up of new galleries, shows and
grants for artists. Initially they reacted to the constraints
of the Franco years with highly conceptual work, before
returning quickly to something more representative and
more typically Spanish with its expressive edge.The
healthy crop of artists that has shuffled forth in the last
30 years has done so with a range of individual styles,
largely unbound by any dominant movements or
schools.
Luis Gordillo
An artist who has worked his way through the likes ofInformalismo, Pop Art and
Symbolism using paint, photos and collage along the way. Known for a use of image
repetition, Gordillo is also often preoccupied with images of a scientific nature. In
2007, aged 72, he won the acclaimed Velázquez Modern Art Prize.
Miquel Barceló
The Majorcan Barceló is probably the most famous of the post-Franco Spanish art
crop. His aggressive brushstrokes inform expressive work, featuring everyday
subjects and scenes from frying pans to a dog in the rain.
Guillermo Pérez Villalta
An Andalusian whose work incorporates a figurative normality rare among his
Spanish peers. His use of colours, mythology and grand structures recall Renaissance
frescos.
Ferrán García Sevilla
Drawing on the dreamy, abstract work of Miró and Tàpies, García Sevilla peppers
the canvas with paint.
José María Sicilia
He began in the 1980s with sensuous landscapes and has maintained an interest in
nature, rendering flowers, animals and insects in work that uses wax and varnish as
well as good old paint.
Five important Spanish artists of the last 30 years
