Skip to main content

Pintura liberada

Apr 1 — Sep 14, 2025 | Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, Spain

Some thirty works by more than twenty artists make up this diverse and colourful mosaic of the figurative painting that became a symbol of the new modernity ushered in by Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1980s. The tour begins with Eduardo Arroyo and Luis Gordillo, examples of the narrative painting from the previous decade that, especially in the case of Gordillo, served as a point of reference and harbinger of the painting of the 1980s: colourful, dreamlike and tremendously subjective.

The figurative art of the 1980s was also largely the consequence of that produced a decade earlier by the so-called Madrid Schizos, the radical modernity of the young Carlos Alcolea, Chema Cobo, Carlos Franco, Herminio Molero, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Manolo Quejido, who raised unusual questions in the contemporary figurative sphere, such as the intellectualization of the artistic act or the assertion of painting as part of high culture.

So, a key figure in the development of art in the 1980s was Pérez Villalta, who produced the most extraordinary paintings, characterised by a nuanced light, a calm rhythm and the importance of architectural elements, narration and optical devices.

Another prominent place was occupied by the more passionate and ironic colourists such as Alcolea, a master of composing illusionistic spaces and clever ambiguity; Carlos Franco, who had a particular taste for deformation and allegory; and Chema Cobo, who was interested in effects of perspective and distortion. Brilliant colours and painting as enjoyment were the hallmarks of Aguirre, Albacete and Navarro Baldeweg, also represented in the exhibition.
[…]

Catalonia, where abstraction and the painting-painting proposed by the Trama group were most prevalent, gave rise to a new expressionist figurative art through two Mallorcans who are fundamental to this story: Ferrán García Sevilla and Miquel Barceló. The former, who hailed from Barcelona’s conceptual scene, expressed himself through a radical style of painting by composing images and signs as in a collage. Barceló officialised his image as a young prodigy when he was selected to take part in Documenta in Kassel in 1982. The artist, who mastered the primitivist side of figurative painting, made a name for himself in 1985 with his solo exhibition at the Palacio de Velázquez in the Retiro.
[…]

Press release

  • read or download in English