4 June – October, 2019 Room 1. Second Floor
Eugenio Fernández Granell (1912-2001). Recognized as one of the representatives of the Spanish historical avant-garde, and formed part of the international surrealist movement that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Although originally Galician, he lived through the Spanish Civil War in exile due to his profound political consciousness during the Franco dictatorship. In his forced American exile, through the forties and mid-eighties, with his definitive return to Spain, Eugenio Granell immersed himself within the different Dominican, Guatemalan, Puerto Rican, and U.S American cultures and traditions; it was during this time that he met different intellectuals, musicians, writers, philosophers, art critics, and artists who in a steady state came up with new ideas within the complex contexts of each country. It is a union between exiled intellectuals that is still remembered today.
This exhibition aims to be a brief approach to the figure of Eugenio and his relationship with the plastic, literary, musical, and audiovisual arts; displaying him not only as a painter, for what he is most known for, but also as an "experimenter." A restless, creative, passionate person, a "story teller" as how he would describe himself.
The exhibition was composed out of a selection of more than sixty pieces between plastic works, bibliographical material, and archives. Several of these pieces were left unpublished, like the transcriptions of a Guatemalan radio program where Eugenio participated in the late forties, or the sketch covers from his soap opera Lo que sucedió… Some pieces, like his drawing titled Metamorfosis vegetal and Tapiz de hojas, have been kept hidden from the public for more than twenty years. There are others that now form part of the artist´s unusual imagination; like the representation of his "Pájaro Pí," or his stylized granellianas figures.
We will find surrealist "brush strokes" of love, poetry and freedom, creativity, humor and opinion, magical landscapes, social criticism, metamorphosis, bestiaries, subconscious, Indian heads, thoughts, encounters, music, hazards, etc; a summary of ideas that are juxtaposed at times and intermingiled in others, linking the soul of Eugenio Granell and his world, granelliano. Creating a unique and universal "everything."
