You wish to be alarmed for any new work by this artist? Please enter your email.
The Spanish painter Fermín Aguayo was born in Sotillo de la Ribera (Burgos province) in 1926. He will become over time one of the most remarkable Spanish painters of the second half of the twentieth century.
Read biography
ARTIST ALARM
Biography of Fermín Aguayo
The Spanish painter Fermín Aguayo was born in Sotillo de la Ribera (Burgos province) in 1926. He will become over time one of the most remarkable Spanish painters of the second half of the twentieth century.
Fermín Aguayo experienced the pain of the Spanish Civil War very early on. In 1936, his native village fell into the hands of Franco, his father and two of his brothers were murdered, Fermín and his mother managed to escape and it was the beginning of a wandering on the roads of Spain.
He was attracted to painting from an early age, stimulated by the discovery of a book on modern painting that he had bought with all his money; there were reproductions of works by Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Braque and Picasso, among others.
Self-taught and discreet, the artist began his artistic life in Zaragoza and participated in both the creation and the first exhibition of the Pórtico group, which was formed in 1947 and is considered the pioneer of the abstract groups created in post-war Spain, far from the conservative aesthetic. In 1949 it changed its name to the School of Zaragoza. This formation, a pioneer in the association of artists for the study and dissemination of abstract painting, will separate a year later. "Fermín Aguayo is intelligent, gifted with color and form" writes Santiago Lagunas.
After moving to Paris in September 1952, Aguayo changed his creative path, recreating a very personal figurative poetics, with a very subtle and expressionist figuration in which the conjunction of light and color are his main allies. The artist thus began an adventure and resumed his pictorial research alone and with the sole support of the Jeanne-Bucher gallery - which organized numerous exhibitions -, his wife and a few friends. In 1954, in Paris, he was hired by Jean-François Jaeger of the Jeanne Bucher gallery as a professional painter with a monthly salary, which gave him great stability in his pictorial work, which evolved towards an essential, intimate and poetic figurativism.
Over time, he established relationships with other artists and critics based in Paris. In this city, his work began to appear regularly, as in other European cities and New York. However, Aguayo always remains outside of any fashion, showing his love for the country where he was born and for the great masters of universal painting, references present in many of his works. On the Parisian scene, the artist tends towards the figurative, but always in an abstract space.
Nearly thirty years after his death, in 2005, the first anthological exhibition of his work is organized by the Museum of the National Center of Art Reina Sofia.
Fermín Aguayo died in Paris in 1977, leaving a virtuoso work inhabited by a deep and disturbing humanity.
1 work(s) available
