Ignacio Pinazo

In this exhibition we can explore Pinazo’s essential themes and see the tremendous modernity of his paintings. A significant group of his works is being presented here for the first time. The importance of the exhibition lies in its presentation of a review of the career of an artist who was fundamental for the modernization of Spanish painting, and also in its emphasis on aspects and genres – such as the portrait, decorative painting and the nude – which were crucial for his development and have received relatively little attention. For his contemporaries, Pinazo represented the new artist who looked at nature directly and illustrated the course that led to modern painting. Pinazo is a perfect example of the contradictions inherent in a 19th-century artist. On the one hand, we can see in him an academic realist painter who executed history paintings very properly and accumulated medals and honours; on the other, we discover a revolutionary artist who was largely ignored. In his most ambitious paintings Pinazo set out from a naturalism that derived from Velázquez, renewing it with exclusively artistic means. Pinazo’s modernity lies, as this exhibition shows, partly in his particular direct approach to reality, in the way in which he addressed his immediate surroundings with exquisite sensitivity. His portraits of himself and of his wife Teresa and of children, especially his own children, transmit the tenderness and vibrant spontaneity with which he expressed his intimacy. The tremendous expressiveness of Pinazo’s paintings is achieved by means of the bold artistic treatment to which he subjects his works, applying paint with spatulas and then scraping the physical material, combining highly detailed motifs with others that are barely sketched in or areas filled with physical matter contrasting with stretches of canvas that are merely primed.