Botín Foundation open Jose Gutierrez Solana Drawings an exhibition on view 19 April–2 June 2013.
Following a four-year search and classification, the Botín Foundation has opened in Santander the most complete exhibition of drawings by José Gutiérrez Solana ever to have been held. Visitors are able to see over 90 drawings, many of which have never previously been published or even shown in public, thus making this event a real first of its kind for judging the ouevre of this exceptional artist.
José Gutiérrez Solana (1886–1945) was chosen by the Botín Foundation—because of his artistic reputation, importance and his close ties to Santander—to be one of the artists in its Spanish drawing corpus, which was launched in 2007 and aims to revaluate this lesser known or appreciated facet of Spain’s greatest artists.
Numerous exhibitions of Solana’s work have been held in the past. However, his facet as a drawer has always been pushed into the background, historically eclipsed by his paintings.
As María José Salazar, the exhibition’s curator, points out: “It is the first exhibition ever devoted entirely to this aspect of his oeuvre, which confirms, once again, the personality of this singular, powerful and hard-to-define artist who produced an art firmly rooted in life, in the traditions and customs of our country and, on many occasions, connected to the land of Cantabria, where he always felt he belonged.”
The exhibition will show every stage in Solana’s creative process thanks to a selection of 90 drawings, including works from his apprentice years, 1896–1900, which have never been on show before, and others from the last years leading up to his death.
The job of finding and cataloguing the works has taken four years. This is how long it took to perform an in-depth analysis of drawings in Solana’s oeuvre, which materialized in the study, classification, and in many cases tracking down of and localizing, 270 drawings executed between 1884 and 1945, 44 of which proved impossible to identify. All of them are featured in the catalogue raisonné—published by the Botín Foundation as part of its collection called Drawings by Spanish Masters—which will be presented alongside the exhibition. In this publication, titled El siempre insólito Solana (The Ever Unusual Solana), the curator performs an extensive breakdown of all of the artist’s works in the genre of drawing, putting them in relation to details about his life and offering a detailed analysis of his oeuvre. Biographical notes about the artist will also be published alongside new information uncovered during research work on this venture.
José Gutiérrez Solana was born in Madrid on the 24th of February 1886, on Carnival Sunday. He died in the same city on the 24th of June 1945. Linked to Cantabria by family bonds, his stays in Santander, where he returned every summer, often appear in his works. The city’s characters and places (The Puertochico Ramp, Sailors, The Merchant Navy Captain…) were reflected in his paintings and his writings.
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