Juan Antonio Aguirre

This is the first retrospective exhibition to be devoted to the work of the painter, theorist and art critic Juan Antonio Aguirre, presenting about 70 works that provide a survey of his career from 1967 to the present day. The accompanying catalogue reproduces all the works exhibited and contains texts by Fernando Huici, Juan Manuel Bonet, Carlos Franco and Guillermo Pérez Villalta. Juan Antonio Aguirre (Madrid 1945) studied Philosophy and Psychology at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. He attended painting classes with the Valencian artist José Manaut Viglietti, who had been a follower of Sorolla, and he also attended the Escuela Central de Artes y Oficios as an external student. In 1965 he presented his first solo exhibition at the Sala Amadís, with a catalogue introduced by the poet and critic Ángel Crespo. Shortly afterwards he was appointed as the director of that gallery, where he promoted young artists. In the late sixties, before finishing his university studies, he began publishing as an art critic in the magazines Gaceta Universitaria and, later, Artes, the prestigious magazine edited by Isabel Cajide, to which he contributed until 1974. At the Sala Amadís (1967) and the Galería Edurne (1968) he organised the Nueva Generación exhibitions, for which he assembled a heterogeneous collection of artists that included Gordillo, Elena Asíns, García Ramos, Barbadillo, Jordi Teixidor, Yturralde, Alexanco, Julio Plaza and Aguirre himself. Nueva Generación represented a breakaway from Informalism and marked the appearance of Pop art in Spain, as well as the movements that came after Pop and the new geometry. Aguirre conceived the group as an alternative to an Informalism that was already consolidated and was in its worst phase: “It had become a fashionable style of painting utterly devoid of content, which was consolidated in the museum in Cuenca in 1967.” In 1967 he held his second solo exhibition as a painter at the Galería Edurne; he did not exhibit again until 1974. He lectured at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid in 1969 and 1970, and with the aid of the Fundación Juan March he published the book Arte último, in which he summed up what Nueva Generación represented. In it he studied the situation of Spanish painting at the time, particularly the work of the members of the group. During his time as director of Amadís he detected the talent of artists such as Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Franco, Rafael Pérez Mínguez, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Mitsuo Miura, Nacho Criado, Santiago Serrano, Soledad Sevilla and Miguel Ángel Campano. He prophesied that the period of the eighties was going to be the “multicolour decade”, the decade of the “multicolour sense of existence”. In the seventies he returned to his activity as a painter, which he combined with working as a curator at the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, of which he became Assistant Director. In 1972 he made a film about the Encuentros de Pamplona, an international forum for interdisciplinary art, including music, poetry, audiovisual spectacles, painting and, above all, happenings and performances. He became a temporary curator at the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in 1976, obtaining a permanent position as a curator by competitive examination in 1980. In 1982 he was made Assistant Director of the MEAC, continuing until 1984, the year when the museum disappeared as such. Shortly afterwards he gave up all museum activity in order to devote himself exclusively to painting. Juan Antonio Aguirre’s paintings have always been figurative, with an eclectic artistic aim. After a brief initial period in which he practised a style close to Naïve painting and produced abstract series, he adopted the compositional rigidity of the Neo-Constructivists, and this soon shaped what was to be his characteristic style, dominated by colour and indistinct shapes, showing the influence of Bonnard, Matisse and Munch. Aguirre recognises that any image could provide him with an excuse to begin a painting, especially if it reproduced moments that were emotionally powerful. The final image has little to do with the origin. The importance of the subject decreases in favour of the enveloping power of colour. His works include still-lifes, reflecting his interest in the most trivial objects and sculpture, interior landscapes, frequently recollections of travels and settings such as Torremolinos, Benidorm or the Sierra of Madrid, and character studies, presenting references to situations he has experienced and autobiographical episodes. He has taken part in celebrated exhibitions, including Nueva Generación 1967–1977 at the Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid 1977; Madrid D. F., Museo Municipal, Madrid 1980; Otras Figuraciones, Obra Cultural de la Caja de Pensiones, Madrid 1981; V Salón de los 16, MEAC, Madrid 1985; Por la Pintura, Diputación Provincial de Huesca, Huesca 1991; 23 artistas, Madrid años 70, Sala de Exposiciones de la Comunidad de Madrid, 1991; Los años pintados, Palacio de Sástago, Saragossa 1994 and Barcelona 1995; and he has presented solo exhibitions at the Sala Amadís (1965), Edurne (1967), Seiquer (1976) and Buades (1980), all in Madrid, and at Juana de Aizpuru (1983) in Seville. In 1997 an exhibition of his recent work (1990–1996) was presented at the Centro Cultural Conde-Duque in Madrid. In January 1996, Juan Antonio Aguirre made a donation to the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern of his private collection of works by other artists, which was exhibited at the IVAM in October of that year, and in September 1998 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The IVAM collection possesses one of his most significant works, Dos de corazones (Two of Hearts), painted in 1982.