Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea studied Drawing at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vitoria-Gasteiz and completed his training at the Círculo de Bellas in Madrid after obtaining an art study grant from the Vidal y Fernando de Amárica Foundation in 1962. He was a regular visitor to the Prado during his time in Madrid, and his early canvases comprise a systematic investigation of landscape painting, with painters such as Fernando de Amárica and Benjamín Palencia as his reference points, and of the informalism and expressionist abstract art trends which were so prevalent in the 1950s.
After staging his first exhibitions in the early 1960s and winning the New Artists Award at the Certamen de Arte Alavés ['Art from Álava Contest'] in 1959, he moved back to the Basque Country. In 1966 he founded the group Orain together with Joaquín Fraile and Juan Mieg. They were later joined by Jesús Echevarría and Alberto Schommer. Ortiz de Elgea's name has since appeared continually in events such as the joint exhibition with painter José Luis Zumeta organised at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country in 2011. At that exhibition, he stressed the importance in his output of the links between pictorial expression and forms in nature. That link has been strengthened based on the idea of travel, with new territories and landscapes that the artist gradually accumulates in his experience.
Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea's works have been exhibited at the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao (2016-2017), at the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, USA, 2013-2014), at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz (2011-2012) and at the Euskal Herria Museoa (Gernika, Bizkaia, 2012).
Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea studied Drawing at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vitoria-Gasteiz and completed his training at the Círculo de Bellas in Madrid after obtaining an art study grant from the Vidal y Fernando de Amárica Foundation in 1962. He was a regular visitor to the Prado during his time in Madrid, and his early canvases comprise a systematic investigation of landscape painting, with painters such as Fernando de Amárica and Benjamín Palencia as his reference points, and of the informalism and expressionist abstract art trends which were so prevalent in the 1950s.
After staging his first exhibitions in the early 1960s and winning the New Artists Award at the Certamen de Arte Alavés ['Art from Álava Contest'] in 1959, he moved back to the Basque Country. In 1966 he founded the group Orain together with Joaquín Fraile and Juan Mieg. They were later joined by Jesús Echevarría and Alberto Schommer. Ortiz de Elgea's name has since appeared continually in events such as the joint exhibition with painter José Luis Zumeta organised at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country in 2011. At that exhibition, he stressed the importance in his output of the links between pictorial expression and forms in nature. That link has been strengthened based on the idea of travel, with new territories and landscapes that the artist gradually accumulates in his experience.
Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea's works have been exhibited at the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao (2016-2017), at the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, USA, 2013-2014), at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz (2011-2012) and at the Euskal Herria Museoa (Gernika, Bizkaia, 2012).