Donostia / San Sebastian 1933 - Donostia / San Sebastian 2011
By:
Roberto Díaz
The full name of this Spanish painter and engraver was Bonifacio Alfonso Gómez Fernández. His style combines informalism with an expressionist, gestural figuration. Gómez's father, a Republican, was shot during the Spanish Civil War. The artist took an interest in drawing from a very early age and during his youth he worked in a number of jobs, including bullfighting, which he gave up in 1953. Two years later, he won the First Prize for Painting in San Sebastian, spurring him definitively to take up a career in painting. Attracted by the artistic milieu of the Cuenca group, he moved to the city in 1968, where he stayed until 1996. His works from the 1970s start from an abstract base, with his characteristic biomorphic, sketchy and gestural forms insinuated on backgrounds of light and subdued colours, with no defined spatial organisation. In the 1980s, his figures became flatter and more linear, sinuous and dynamic, taking up the entire surface of the painting on an undefined background in more sharply-contrasted and expressive colours. Towards the end of the decade his figurative world was influenced by the work of Roberto Matta and his palette became darker. He combined his painting with engraving, with editions such as Soups and Delicacies (1976) and Tomilleros (1979). In 1993 he won the National Engraving Award.
From 1970 he was linked to the Juana Mordó Gallery, where he continued to hold numerous exhibitions until the 1990s. Amongst his most important solo exhibition were shows at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Art (1983); the San Telmo Museum (Donostia-San Sebastian, 1988); the Antonio Pérez Foundation (Cuenca, 2001); an extensive retrospective of his work at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 2007); and an anthological exhibition at the Sala Kubo-Kutxa (Donostia-San Sebastian, 2012).
The full name of this Spanish painter and engraver was Bonifacio Alfonso Gómez Fernández. His style combines informalism with an expressionist, gestural figuration. Gómez's father, a Republican, was shot during the Spanish Civil War. The artist took an interest in drawing from a very early age and during his youth he worked in a number of jobs, including bullfighting, which he gave up in 1953. Two years later, he won the First Prize for Painting in San Sebastian, spurring him definitively to take up a career in painting. Attracted by the artistic milieu of the Cuenca group, he moved to the city in 1968, where he stayed until 1996. His works from the 1970s start from an abstract base, with his characteristic biomorphic, sketchy and gestural forms insinuated on backgrounds of light and subdued colours, with no defined spatial organisation. In the 1980s, his figures became flatter and more linear, sinuous and dynamic, taking up the entire surface of the painting on an undefined background in more sharply-contrasted and expressive colours. Towards the end of the decade his figurative world was influenced by the work of Roberto Matta and his palette became darker. He combined his painting with engraving, with editions such as Soups and Delicacies (1976) and Tomilleros (1979). In 1993 he won the National Engraving Award.
From 1970 he was linked to the Juana Mordó Gallery, where he continued to hold numerous exhibitions until the 1990s. Amongst his most important solo exhibition were shows at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Art (1983); the San Telmo Museum (Donostia-San Sebastian, 1988); the Antonio Pérez Foundation (Cuenca, 2001); an extensive retrospective of his work at the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 2007); and an anthological exhibition at the Sala Kubo-Kutxa (Donostia-San Sebastian, 2012).