Juan Navarro Baldeweg

In this retrospective at the IVAM Centre del Carme, paintings by Juan Navarro Baldeweg—awarded the National Visual Arts Prize in 1990—are for the first time exhibited together with his Conceptual pieces and his architectural work, which has led him to be considered one of the great figures that Spain has given to late twentieth-century architecture. The exhibition presents over a hundred works, including maquettes and photographs of buildings, architectural drawings, installations and paintings, ranging over the period from the sixties to the present day. The accompanying catalogue reproduces the works exhibited and contains texts by Ángel González and Enrique Granell, the curators of the exhibition. The painter and architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Santander 1939) studied drawing and painting in Santander, and engraving at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. In 1960 he presented his first exhibition at the Galería Fernando Fe in Madrid, and in 1965 his work was shown at the Galería Edurne. Between 1960 and 1965 he studied architecture at the Escuela de Arquitectura in Madrid, where he obtained his doctorate in 1969. The Fundación Juan March in Madrid awarded him a grant to study abroad in 1970. From 1971 to 1975, at the invitation of Professor Gyorgy Kepes, he carried out research at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, USA. After his return to Spain, in 1977 he was awarded the Professorship of Elements of Composition at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Madrid. As a visual artist, he was initially interested in Conceptual experiments and Post-Pictorial Abstraction close to the principles of Action Painting. In 1965 he made collages and paintings into which he introduced silhouettes of spectators in front of a geometrical figure. His first kinetic pieces also date from that period. In 1972 he took part in the Encuentros de Pamplona, an international interdisciplinary art exhibition embracing music, poetry, audiovisual spectacles, painting, happenings and performances; and his work was shown at the Biennale di Venezia in 1978. It was during that period that he embarked on a series of installations, including Casa Duchamp (Duchamp House), 1975, which received the Japanese Shinkenchiku prize, and Luz y metales (Light and Metal), 1976, exhibited at the Sala Vinçon in Barcelona. In the eighties, painting occupied a central place in his artistic activity and he began the series Kouroi, Los vencejos (Swifts), Danaes and La casa (The House), the last-named inspired by his Mediterranean home. In these series there is a prevalence of colour, and trace of painters such as Matisse and Picasso can be detected. His most recent work includes the new series Los árboles (Trees), in which there are traces of Cubism.