María Gómez
Salamanca 1953

María Gómez studied at the School of Arts and Craft in Salamanca, the San Jorge School of Fine Arts, Barcelona (1973-1975), and the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid (1975-1978), where she graduated. In 1980, she received a grant from the French Government to study engraving with Bruno Müller in Paris. In 1991, she won another scholarship to study at the Spanish Academy in Rome.

Her pictorial work, which began in the late seventies, consists of a figuration of classical consonances and frequently features solitary figures in idealised, imaginary landscapes, that are in some ways reminiscent of Italian metaphysical paintings. In her watercolours from the 1980s, figure and landscape merge to form vague, veiled forms in ochre, grey, sienna and bluish tones that imbue the pictures with a sort of misty atmosphere, as if expressing an 'interior landscape'. In the 1990s, her paintings began to feature introspective female figures, often depicted reading, whom we might possibly identify with the artist herself. The broad landscapes have been replaced by interior rooms, like spaces of search or transit, with light acting as a symbolic and metaphysical element. She has continued to work in this formal and compositional style to the present.

Although she held her first solo exhibition at the Galería Tebas in Madrid in 1977, it was not until the 1980s that her career really took off, with exhibitions at the Galería Montenegro (Madrid, 1983, 1985 and 1987); the V Salón de los 16 at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (Madrid, 1985); a show entitled 'Spanish Bilder' at the Kunstverein of Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart (Germany, 1986); and 'Época Nueva: Painting and Sculpture from Spain', at the Meadows Museum (Dallas, United States, 1988) and the Chicago Public Library (Chicago, United States, 1989). In the succeeding decades, her work has been shown frequently in major Spanish galleries and she has staged solo shows at the Malaga Museum of Fine Art (1989); Sala El Brocense (Cáceres, 1996); and the Museum of Salamanca (2004), among others.

Roberto Díaz