Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Días de junio IV [June Days IV]

Image caption
PABLO PALAZUELO

Días de junio IV [June Days IV]

  • 1990
  • Patinated Corten steel
  • 233 x 300 x 86 cm
  • Cat. E_90
  • Acquired in 1992
By:
Isabel Tejeda

The Banco de España collection boasts a fine range of works by Pablo Palazuelo, drawn from nearly his whole career from the 1960s to the 1990s. They show the different disciplines used by the Madrid artist to express his profound, poetic idea of abstraction: drawing, painting and sculpture, with the latter also including the designing of works for public spaces (June Days IV, 1990).

After his time in Paris, Pablo Palazuelo began to use geometry to analyse the material world. At the same time he turned to spirituality, Kabbalah, metaphysics and oriental thought. That would not only lead throughout his career to purity and minimalization of forms and colours, but would also be reflected in the titles of his works. For example, Mandala IV (1966) refers to the Hindu and Buddhist drawings that represent the universe based on a circle within a quadrangular form; in turn, Monroy V (Yantra) (1985) combines biographical information — the town in Cáceres where Palazuelo spent a good part of his life — with a Sanskrit word that refers to a geometric form to be reconstructed mentally when meditating. Geometry and mysticism are combined in Palazuelo’s work as two strands of the same thread.

However, there is not only mysticism in his work but also the nature and emotion that pulsating life produces. Pablo Palazuelo repeatedly used a line-based form that is visibly modified: he makes it grow and shrink rhythmically, sometimes stressing its centre as in Mandala IV; Sub-Rose IV (1977); Monroy V (Yantra). His work thus refers to organic values, human beings where the large – macrocosmos – and the small – microcosmos – are identified. Titles such as Sylvarum IV (‘forest’ in Latin), from 1987, highlight how natural life was an important source of inspiration for Palazuelo’s constructive forms. There are also works where that replication, like energy, is generated endlessly, like an echo with multiple permutations, once again as branching. Cases in point include Grand dessin (1960), Sylvarum IV and Mo-Tseu II (1987). This feeling also reverberates in his sculpture (June Days IV).

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Pablo Palazuelo
Madrid 1915 - Galapagar (Madrid) 2007

Pablo Palazuelo was a painter, sculptor and engraver, and was considered to be one of the most important figures of Spanish geometric abstraction in the second half of the 20th century. He began to study Architecture in Madrid (1932-1934). He then attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Oxford, where he passed the Intermediate Exam of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1934-1936). From 1939 onwards, he devoted himself entirely to painting, initially under the influence of the Cubists and of the work of Paul Klee. He then moved on to pure abstraction in 1948, into which he delved further thanks to a grant in Paris, where he would live until 1969 and where he would become internationally known with works based on observing natural structures, using cellular elements or crystallisations provided by scientific photography. In Paris he met Eduardo Chillida and Ellsworth Kelly and was invited to take part in the May Salons from 1948 to 1950, as well as being part of a collective exhibition at the mythical Denise René Gallery. In the 1950s he embarked on an experimental search that culminated in the creation of a legible style on the fringes of orthodox abstractionism. It was unveiled at his first show at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1955, and he regularly exhibited at its different venues until the 1980s.

Palazuelo was influenced by Cubism, Bauhaus, Neoplasticism, constructivist rationalism, science, the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Mircea Eliade on the cosmological and psychic implications, and oriental cognitive premises. A diaphanous, intuitive ‘trans-geometry’ – as he called it – of variations and the ability to produce carefully achieved colours, lines and polygons led to the pinnacle of his work. In 1969 he returned to Spain; he settled in Monroy (Cáceres) in 1974, where he embarked on a new stage of exploration with the introduction of time as a factor when he approached pictorial representation as musical notation by means of graphic signs. After 1979, he spent more time on sculpture, in which he developed the visual concepts of his painting.

His work was exhibited in important solo shows, including one at La Chaux- de-Fonds Museum of Fine Arts (Switzerland, 1972); his first retrospective was shown at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1995) and the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 1995); there was a further solo show at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005); and his last major retrospective was at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, with travelling exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2006- 2008). His accolades include the Kandinsky Painting Prize (1952); the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1982); the Comunidad de Madrid Prize for Visual Arts (1994); and the Velázquez Award for Fine Arts (2004).

Roberto Díaz

 
«Palazuelo», Galería Soledad Lorenzo (Madrid, 1991). «50 Years of Spanish Sculpture», Jardins Du Palais Royal (Paris, 2001). «50 Years of Spanish Sculpture», Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. MNCARS (Madrid, 2001).
Francisco Calvo Serraller Palazuelo, Madrid, Galería Soledad Lorenzo, 1991. Alfonso de la Torre Pablo Palazuelo. Catálogo razonado, Madrid & Barcelona, Fundación Azcona, Fundación Pablo Palazuelo, MNCARS y MACBA, 2015. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.