José Gutiérrez Solana is one of the leading names in the history of Spanish twentieth-century art. After attending the San Fernando School of Fine Arts between 1900 and 1904 and journeying around the Iberian Peninsula, he settled in Madrid, where he became part of the city's circle of intellectuals and artists. During the Civil War, he went into exile in Paris, but returned and took up permanent residence in Madrid in 1939.
He was a regular at some of the city's cultural gatherings (tertulias), where he rubbed shoulders with Ricardo Baroja, José Bergamín and his fellow artists Francisco Iturrino and Julio Romero de Torres. Gutiérrez Solana masterfully captured these figures in paintings such as The Gathering at the Café de Pombo (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1920). However, he charted his career on the fringes of the avant-garde modes and languages of his contemporaries. Known as the 'painter of Black Spain', Gutiérrez Solana's images trace a costumbrista path through the most grotesque side of the society of his time. It is a gloomy portrait, born out of his visits to graveyards, brothels, bullrings, flea markets, churches and religious processions. His pictures transport us to a phantasmagorical world, populated by the cadavers of modernism: inert mannequins and maids with their throats slit. His work draws on numerous sources and references, not least the masquerade and the carnival, the tenebrist pessimism of the Baroque, Goya's Black Paintings and elements of folk culture.
At an exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in 2004, organised by the museum's expert and curator María José Salazar, together with writer Andrés Trapiello, the historian and later director of the museum Juan Manuel Bonet said that Gutiérrez Solana 'reaches a rare, singular, peripheral, problematic universality [...]' and compared him to other atypical painters such as James Ensor and Armando Reverón.
Numerous retrospectives of his work have been held, particularly at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1998 and 2004); the Botín Foundation (Madrid, 2013); the Picasso Museum in Malaga (2010); and the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts (2007).
José Gutiérrez Solana is one of the leading names in the history of Spanish twentieth-century art. After attending the San Fernando School of Fine Arts between 1900 and 1904 and journeying around the Iberian Peninsula, he settled in Madrid, where he became part of the city's circle of intellectuals and artists. During the Civil War, he went into exile in Paris, but returned and took up permanent residence in Madrid in 1939.
He was a regular at some of the city's cultural gatherings (tertulias), where he rubbed shoulders with Ricardo Baroja, José Bergamín and his fellow artists Francisco Iturrino and Julio Romero de Torres. Gutiérrez Solana masterfully captured these figures in paintings such as The Gathering at the Café de Pombo (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1920). However, he charted his career on the fringes of the avant-garde modes and languages of his contemporaries. Known as the 'painter of Black Spain', Gutiérrez Solana's images trace a costumbrista path through the most grotesque side of the society of his time. It is a gloomy portrait, born out of his visits to graveyards, brothels, bullrings, flea markets, churches and religious processions. His pictures transport us to a phantasmagorical world, populated by the cadavers of modernism: inert mannequins and maids with their throats slit. His work draws on numerous sources and references, not least the masquerade and the carnival, the tenebrist pessimism of the Baroque, Goya's Black Paintings and elements of folk culture.
At an exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in 2004, organised by the museum's expert and curator María José Salazar, together with writer Andrés Trapiello, the historian and later director of the museum Juan Manuel Bonet said that Gutiérrez Solana 'reaches a rare, singular, peripheral, problematic universality [...]' and compared him to other atypical painters such as James Ensor and Armando Reverón.
Numerous retrospectives of his work have been held, particularly at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1998 and 2004); the Botín Foundation (Madrid, 2013); the Picasso Museum in Malaga (2010); and the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts (2007).