Luis Delacámara
Madrid 1942 - Ávila 2006

Luis Delacámara was a self-taught painter and only spent a short period studying at the Madrid School of Arts and Crafts. In 1959, he began to forge links with the world of cinema, in the art department of the film studios of Samuel Bronston, where he learnt the rudiments of painting. His artistic career began in the 1960s with figurative painting with an expressionist influence, coming in the wake of the new figuration in Spain during that decade. His works are crucial and social, and are populated with figures tending to the grotesque, with faces and bodies superimposed, often with changes of scale, which gives his paintings a great expressive charge, in works such as The Soldier (1965) and Wild Painting (1967). In the following decade, his work evolved towards painting rooted in the pop style, playing with duplications and variations of motifs, changes of scale and displacement of forms, as in his 28 Aspects for Fifth Harmony (1978). From the 1980s, his painting drifted towards a syncretism of forms and of the space represented, in facets of plain colour that define the composition, as can be seen in his The Three Black Graces (1987-1990) series.

From the 1980s onwards, Delacámara achieved widespread recognition and he had a solo room at the Spanish Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale. He received a Special Mention at the XIV Cagnes-Sur-Mer International Festival of Painting in 1983; the First Gran Prix at the Valparaíso International Art Biennial in 1983; and a scholarship to research new expressive forms by the Spanish Ministry of Culture that same year. He regularly exhibited on the Spanish gallery circuit from 1964 on and an important retrospective of his work was staged at the Art Museum of the Americas (Washington D. C., 1991).

Roberto Díaz