Ramón Gaya

Ramón Gaya was a precociously mature individual, intensely involved in the experience of the Second Republic, especially the Teaching Missions and the magazine Hora de España. Later he suffered the misfortunes of exile, returning to Spain in the silence of the last years of the dictatorship, a time when the critical distance that he maintained from the paths pursued by others kept him apart from contemporary trends in art except at certain specific moments. It was in the 1980s that his work began to receive recognition, in a series of public and institutional events that culminated in the award of the first Velázquez Prize in 2002.Ramón Gaya considered himself to be “a painter who writes”. Consistency is the great distinguishing feature in the legacy of paintings that constitute his oeuvre, which became gradually more refined, progressively more essential, as he painted more and more with less and less while never losing contact with reality. He was a great connoisseur of art history, and the strict application of thinking of great profundity and singularity in his paintings and writings teaches us to recognise and appreciate the work produced by a few select painters, poets, sculptors and musicians.This exhibition of fifty paintings is a magnificent opportunity to see a selection of pictures which, in many cases, are an act of homage: these are Ramón Gaya’s encounters with the painters whose work on canvas or on paper he most admired. The result is an unsystematic survey of the work of a series of painters who are dissimilar in terms of geographical origin, distanced in time, different in formal appearance, but all possessed of great creative power; and with all of them he finds a place where he can engage in dialogue.