Amalia Avia was a member of the circle of artists known as the ‘Madrid Realists’. She began her career in the 1950s at the studio of Eduardo Peña in Madrid. While there she met others of her generation such as Antonio López, Julio and Francisco López Hernández and Isabel Quintanilla, plus Lucio Muñoz, whom she married in 1960. From 1956 to 1960 she attended open-access classes at the Circle of Fine Arts and began painting in a realistic, figurative style. She focused on social themes in both rural and urban settings, depicting ordinary people and their everyday lives in dark, muted colours. These colours were to become a characteristic feature of her work. In the late 1960s cityscapes came to supersede human figures in her paintings. In the early 1970s she began to focus on the nooks and crannies, buildings, corners and streets of Madrid, in works depicting the display windows and facades of old shops and businesses with chipped walls covered in graffiti and faded posters and locked doors. In many cases she painted direct, front-on views, as an expression or classification of the vestiges of a time in the past when the city was racing headlong towards modernity. She also painted indoor domestic scenes which were empty of people, so that the focus was on the objects and furniture. She also worked in graphic arts at this time.

Her first solo exhibition was held at the Fernando Fe Gallery (Madrid, 1959). It was followed by others at the Juana Mordó Gallery (Madrid, 1964) and the Biosca Gallery (Madrid, 1961, 1972, 1976, 1983 and 1985), making her a constant presence on the Spanish art gallery scene. In 1997 a major retrospective of her work was staged at the La Villa Cultural Centre in Madrid. She also took part in numerous exhibitions on Spanish realist art in Spain, the United States, Germany and the UK. One of the most recent of these was the ‘Realistas de Madrid’ [Madrid Realists] exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, 2016). In 2013 the Academy of Fine Arts organised an exhibition entitled ‘El Madrid de Amalia Avia, Breton y Falla’ [The Madrid of Amalia Avia, Breton and Falla]. She won many awards, including the Francisco de Goya Award for Painting awarded by the City of Madrid (1978) and the Madrid City Hall Medal for Artistic Merit (1997). In 2004 she published her memoirs under the title De puertas adentro [“Behind Closed Doors”].

Roberto Díaz