Young realist artists debut at the MUREC

Almeria,

Last summer the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. MUREC, in Almería, called the first edition of its Young Spanish Realist Artists Contest. It responded to its fundamental objective of showing the evolution of realist art in our country from 1900 to the present: authors under 35 years of age were invited to opt to be part of a group exhibition that, in addition to allowing the public to learn about recent trends in the field of figuration, would be intended to boost the professional careers of the participants.

The contest was open to painters and sculptors and was attended by 144 creators, of whom twenty-four have been selected to be included in that exhibition by a jury composed of Andrés García Ibáñez, artist and president of FAIC; Francisco Javier Pérez Rojas, professor of Art History at the University of Valencia; and Juan Manuel Martín Robles, director of MUREC.

The chosen ones show us their proposals in this Almería center until next January and the youngest among them are barely over twenty: they are Paula Alicia, Manu Barba, Adriana Berges, Virginia Bersabé, Marta Cano, Rosa Cano, Pepe Domínguez, Alexia Mariana Escobar, Isaac Expósito, Alfonso del Moral, Mateo Hurtado, Juan Jesús Lobato, Paula López, Martín Luengo, Pedro Alfonso Méndez, Miguel Nieto, Ondina Oliva, Héctor Palacios, Maite Pinto, José Antonio Rivero, David Urazán, Eduardo Urdiales, Diego Vallejo and Nacho Vergara.

One of those selected has already starred in an exhibition this summer at the museum: Virginia Bersabé from Córdoba, who dedicates her compositions to the reflection in the body, of her grandmother and the older woman, of memory, lived stories, vulnerability and strength. And two of them have received the awards of the call, worth 3,000 euros each: Isaac Expósito from Jaen, for my parents (2025); and Diego Vallejo from Avila, for blue silence (2025).

In the first work, Expósito represented his parents in the living room of their family home, in an everyday and at the same time fleeting scene that the artist wanted to fix in his memory, making the theoretically anodyne infinite. The jury evaluated this work his defense of the classic and his fidelity to the truth in the portrait (…), his reflection of time stopped in the look and gesture, his sobriety, his craft and his respect for pictorial tradition.

As to blue silenceis an allegory of the Vallejo-García generation, that of those born in the early nineties, through gestures, light and the stripping of individual features. We contemplate an interior, unrecognizable and at a time intimate and theatrical, in which two figures appear; A cold blue tone dominates the composition, contrasting with three red dots in the center of the image, in the shape of socks and a fire extinguisher. Both in this chromatic contrast and in the attitude of the two portrayed, one can see the calm broken by the unexpected, and an invitation to the viewer to complete the story from their own perspective.

In this case, the jury has appreciated its contemporary and youthful language, its combination of everyday life and cinematography and the translation of emotions into atmospheres and gestures.

Honorable mentions, for their part, went to Marta Cano Delgado, for Dreamer; Pepe Domínguez, by The shame; Virginia Bersabé, by The curtain; and Maite Pinto Zangróniz, for Silken whispers.