Realistic young people: figuration for the new city

Almería,

A year after its opening, in March 2024 and with the aim of claiming the contributions of Spanish artists to realism, the Murec Almeria hosts its first collective exhibition, under the police station of Juan Manuel Martín Robles and Welcome Simón Robles, its director and its conservative respectively.

The exhibition “Habitability space. Urban landscape and contemporary Spanish realism” has work of sixteen painters from our country, belonging to various generations but mostly young and linked to the Andalusian context: from the essential Antonio López, who supported the implementation of this museum, to the veterans José María Mosque, Jesús Ibáñez, Gerardo Pita, Clara Ganutgia, Carlos Morago and Felix and authors born in the seventies and eighties, such as Javier Bassecourt, Alberto Martín, Rocío Cano, Fernando Devesa, Eduardo Millán, Carmen Chofre, Jorge Gallego, David Martínez and Jorge Abbad.

The Murec summons them around realism (realism today, as in force) and around the city: the thematic axis of this exhibition is the urban landscape and its habitability; The selected works capture specific parts of certain locations with which these artists are linked through memory or experience. It wants to underline this proposal that the painting can also be defined from the relationship of those who light it with its most immediate environment, the place where it lives.

Antonio López is not integrated into his journey as a guest artist, but as a starting point (together with Madrid’s realists) of different generations of creators who have made the urban realities that are closest to them, those in which they reside, the center of their production. In a daily basis, they all take the street, not only as a transit space, but as a place to develop the act of painting: as their study without walls and subject to weather conditions.

The fact that Ibáñez, Gangutia or Mosque (the latter starred in a recent exhibition in the same center) will turn their concerns in the city will be related to that they received classes from López himself. They are usually integrated into the second generation of realists, while they would compose the third Felix de la Concha, Gerardo Pita or Carlos Morago, who address the urban from particular poetics, linked to the seriality and the passage of time, work or treatment of light.

As for the youngest, many of them have worked in the contemporary painting workshops organized, again, by Antonio López and Andrés García Ibáñez in Olula del Río, or in the Francisco de Goya Chair of Caja Ávila.

Given the generational differences, the exposure allows us to review how it has evolved, since the middle of the last century, the pictorial construction of the urban image and of what in the cities is not appreciated, but it beats.

The ultimate purpose of the exhibition is to influence the realistic style to live a good moment among young artists and that many of them continue to paint in streets, squares or stations a natural habit. In their compositions, neighborhood buildings sometimes become quixotic giants, fog wins space to the ground or fit the unfinished.