Room 17

“Una pintura más pintada” (A More Painted Painting) is how Juan Manuel Bonet once referred to a new avant-garde in painting championed by critics such as Ángel González, Federico Jiménez Losantos, Fernando Huici, and Alberto Cardín. What would eventually be called Transavantgarde reclaimed the autonomy of art from its social discourse, proclaiming that the object of painting is nothing more than painting itself.  

This criticism constructed a genius loci—a spirit of a place, a local temperament—to underpin a Spanish art in decline on the peninsula, as can be seen in the phenomenon of the Atlántica group in Galicia. This localism resulted in the apparent contradiction of the international commercial success of extreme individualism and radical artistic subjectivity, perfect vehicles for the transnational impulse behind Spain’s adhesion to the European Economic Community in 1986. 

The rejection by supporters of the pictorial trend of conceptualism and any political form of art, their accommodation to the market, and the rapid consecration of supportive critics in the media and in curatorial circles at the time would result in its institutional abandonment in subsequent decades. From a distance, one can recognize impure, nondoctrinaire postures—with sociopolitical biases and even conceptual attitudes— that narrowed positions and erased the rigid categories that, at the time, were fiercely defended, and whose purity is only preserved in the archives of art publications.