Esteban Vicente
15 Sep - 28 Oct 2011
ESTEBAN VICENTE
15 September – 28 October, 2011
Galería Elvira González opens the 2011-2012 season with a solo exhibition by Esteban Vicente (Turégano, Segovia, 1903 – Long Island, USA, 2001), the abstract expressionist whose work it has been showing for over twenty years. The exhibition overviews Vicente’s body of work from the 1960s to the 1990s with a selection of original oil paintings, collages and drawings.
Though born in Spain, Vicente’s career as an artist was made largely in New York, where he moved to at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and was to live for the rest of his life. In the decade of the 1940s he made the acquaintance of the artists who would come to be known as the New York School, establishing close relationships with many of them.
As a result of connections with this seminal movement, Vicente’s work evolved towards his signature style. In the 1950s and 60s, figurative forms gradually disappeared from his work and were replaced by symbols and large heavily impastoed stains of colour, dovetailing with the painting of his friend de Kooning.
He went on to make large paintings dominated by fields of colour and was invited to take part in some of the most influential exhibitions of the time, such as New Talents 1950 and 9th Street, earning him a prominent place within the first generation of American Abstract Expressionism.
Foreground and background are indistinguishable in both his oil paintings as well as his collages, while the composition is structured around a set of forms and volatile brushwork that takes over the whole surface of the canvas, creating a perfect, balanced composition with stains of bright colours.
As Barbara Rose stated, his painting is rich in detail, varied in mood, and is as reserved, refined and disciplined as the artist himself, who painted every single day of his life. She says that it like a form of breathing and a withdrawal from the noise and chaos of the outside world.
He was awarded the Gold Medal of Fine Arts of Spain in 1991, and then the National Fine Arts Award in 1998; the following year he was granted the Gran Cruz of the Order of Alfonso X el Sabio.
The show at Galería Elvira González is held concurrently with Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculptures by Esteban Vicente at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, a touring exhibition organised jointly with Grey Art Gallery, New York. Based on meticulous research and a carefully studied mise en scène, this exhibition was conceived to provide an international survey of Esteban Vicente’s work.
After opening in New York at Grey Art Gallery (January-March 2011), the show then went to the Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (15 May - 31 July 2011) and will conclude at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia (27 September 2011 – 8 January 2012).
15 September – 28 October, 2011
Galería Elvira González opens the 2011-2012 season with a solo exhibition by Esteban Vicente (Turégano, Segovia, 1903 – Long Island, USA, 2001), the abstract expressionist whose work it has been showing for over twenty years. The exhibition overviews Vicente’s body of work from the 1960s to the 1990s with a selection of original oil paintings, collages and drawings.
Though born in Spain, Vicente’s career as an artist was made largely in New York, where he moved to at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and was to live for the rest of his life. In the decade of the 1940s he made the acquaintance of the artists who would come to be known as the New York School, establishing close relationships with many of them.
As a result of connections with this seminal movement, Vicente’s work evolved towards his signature style. In the 1950s and 60s, figurative forms gradually disappeared from his work and were replaced by symbols and large heavily impastoed stains of colour, dovetailing with the painting of his friend de Kooning.
He went on to make large paintings dominated by fields of colour and was invited to take part in some of the most influential exhibitions of the time, such as New Talents 1950 and 9th Street, earning him a prominent place within the first generation of American Abstract Expressionism.
Foreground and background are indistinguishable in both his oil paintings as well as his collages, while the composition is structured around a set of forms and volatile brushwork that takes over the whole surface of the canvas, creating a perfect, balanced composition with stains of bright colours.
As Barbara Rose stated, his painting is rich in detail, varied in mood, and is as reserved, refined and disciplined as the artist himself, who painted every single day of his life. She says that it like a form of breathing and a withdrawal from the noise and chaos of the outside world.
He was awarded the Gold Medal of Fine Arts of Spain in 1991, and then the National Fine Arts Award in 1998; the following year he was granted the Gran Cruz of the Order of Alfonso X el Sabio.
The show at Galería Elvira González is held concurrently with Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculptures by Esteban Vicente at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, a touring exhibition organised jointly with Grey Art Gallery, New York. Based on meticulous research and a carefully studied mise en scène, this exhibition was conceived to provide an international survey of Esteban Vicente’s work.
After opening in New York at Grey Art Gallery (January-March 2011), the show then went to the Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (15 May - 31 July 2011) and will conclude at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia (27 September 2011 – 8 January 2012).