Untitled - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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Untitled – 02/155

Gortázar, Alfonso

Bilbao, 01/01/1955

Oil on canvas

199.8 x 180 cm

GORTAZAR (bottom right hand corner)

1991

Last decade of the 20th century

02/155

Acquired in 2002

Since he began painting in the late 1970s, Gortázar has created his own, remarkably coherent idiom, mostly figurative, and a personal sense of colour. Irony, quotes from art history, and the portrayal of everyday objects and his immediate surroundings are the tools with which the artist builds a confident, suggestive narration. After a cycle in which he produced group portraits, the central theme of his works has been art itself, embodied in the painter and the tools of his trade. His production is littered with self-portraits and portrayals of brushes and canvases, at times painted and at others blank, a metaphor of the artist's permanent, ongoing search in art and, perhaps, in life. His initial references were to the Basque artists of the first half of the 20th century, Pop Art (Larry Rivers and David Hockney) and the various trends within Expressionism.

The work is untitled and done on the large scale, like much of the work produced by this painter in the last two decades. Untitled is dominated by one of his recurring iconographic motifs, the tent, which houses domestic objects in a landscape just about suggested by the clouds and the small tree that frames it. (Marta García Maruri)

Selected bibliography

  • Adquisiciones 02/07 [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2007. pp. 118-119, n° cat. 50.
  • Guía Artistas Vascos. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2008. pp. 188-189.
  • Gida Euskal Artistak. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Eder Museoa, 2008. pp. 188-189.
  • Guide Basque Artists. Bilbao, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, 2012. pp. 188-189, n° cat. 107b.
  • Viar, Javier. Historia del arte vasco : de la Guerra Civil a nuestros días, 1936-2016. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2017. pp. 614, 616, il.
  • Después del 68 : arte y prácticas artísticas en el País Vasco, 1968-2018 [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. p. 433.