Sin título (Untitled)

Juan Antonio Aguirre, an art critic and painter, was one of the leading experts on Spanish painting of the 1960s and 1970s. He was director of the Amadís Gallery, where he supported young artists such as Carlos Alcolea, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Miguel Ángel Campano. He brought together the group he called the “New Generation”, featuring artists such as Elena Asins and Luis Gordillo, which marked a break with the informalist tradition. He served as subdirector of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (MEAC) between 1982 and 1984.
Aguirre conceived of painting as a joy, following in the footsteps of Bonnard and Matisse. His work is characterised by a chromatic brilliance and a reinterpretation of the pictorial tradition, in keeping with the painting of the 1980s, which he himself termed ‘the multicoloured decade’. In Untitled (1984), he revisits the classical figure of the bather and alludes to Hockney’s aquatic world with an expressionist approach where colour both constructs and blurs the forms.

María Teresa López Flores