30 may, 2024 – 2025
Rooms 2 and 3. Second floor
Eugenio Granell and Carlos Maside were two Galician artists who coincided in the same space at different times, only 15 years apart.
Carlos Maside, originally from Pontecesures, was born on March 16, 1897. The painter was born in a small rural village that he remembered fondly in his adult life. A large part of his pictorial work is inspired by those images of everyday life when he was a child: the fairs, the street stalls, the china shops…
The innocence of this boy disappeared when he was 15 years old and he lived through the death of his father, leaving his studies to start working. His artistic and social training was completely self-taught. Carlos Maside belonged to the Novecentista group, a group of artists who proclaimed themselves to be secular, civic and democratic, who were committed to a prosperous Second Republic. At the age of thirty, Maside was able to travel to Paris thanks to a scholarship to study the technique of engraving.
Eugenio Granell was born in A Coruña in 1912 and grew up in Santiago de Compostela. Like Maside, he constantly remembered his childhood as a positive experience that conditioned his artistic development in the future. Granell began his artistic career as a child playing the violin. At the age of 16, he moved to Madrid to continue his violin studies at Madrid’s Escuela Superior de Música, thanks to a scholarship he received from A Coruña Provincial Council. The young Granell took a political stance, not because of a tragic situation like Maside’s, but because he had the opportunity to dialogue with political and literary figures. During his stay in Madrid, Granell became a member of the P.O.U.M. and at a political event he had his first contact with Surrealist art.
These two narratives resemble each other in many ways: the two artists were strongly marked by their childhood, they travelled (at very different ages) to expand their artistic knowledge, and they positioned themselves politically at a very early age. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, everyone found different ways to survive the war and the dictatorship.
During the Civil War, Granell took an active part in the conflict and later went into exile from Paris to Latin America in 1939. At that time he met his future partner Amparo Segarra, with whom he began a new life in the Dominican Republic.
Carlos Maside was a drawing teacher from 1937 to 1939. Masidethen found himself in a state of unemployment and poverty in which the only economic resource he had was his work, which would be censored and banned from all public spheres. The painter was an outcast in his own country. Meanwhile, Granell was in exile that took him to different countries in the Caribbean and New York. The painter from Pontecesures isolated himself in his city of Santiago de Compostela, living what was called “Internal Exile.”
Two different ways to survive, a key period for the two artists to find their artistic voice.
Granell deepened his relationship with the visual arts through surrealism and Carlos Maside, at the end of the 40s, began a period of alienation from his own interest in the political and social struggle.
Eduardo Valiña. Curator
