José de Martín Simón
José de Martín Simón (born March 19, 1940 in Gata , Province of Cáceres , Extremadura , Spain ) is a Spanish painter and sculptor of the Abstract Expressionism movement .
Life
Childhood and youth
José de Martín Simón was born the fourth of six children to a farm laborer. When he was three years old, his family left the village and moved to the industrial city of Bilbao , where the boy was already helping to support the family at the age of seven.
In 1953 José de Martín Simón met the painter Juan Valenciaga, who became his first teacher and recommended him entry into the "School of Arts and Crafts" which he began the following year.
During the following four years the young artist worked with Valenciaga and the painter and professor Solís and exhibited with them.
Basque stage
Under the influence of Basque Impressionism rooted in the area, he realized drawings, watercolors, pastels and oil paintings, preferring to use earth colors and referring to the aesthetic forms of painters such as Etxebarría. Within this Basque style, however, he tried to go further by capturing the sooty air of Bilbao, the blackness of the estuary and the coal steamers, the haze, fog and humidity of the air and the fading mountains in the distance. He came to a more expressionistic style of Basque painting, like that of Aurelio Arteta or Agustín Ibarrola , even if their aesthetic forms had already been overcome.
In 1958, Martín Simón realized that he would not be able to develop further if he stayed in Bilbao and explored the possibility of moving to Rome with the intention of studying the classics and Italian painting.
1960s
After arriving in Rome, he made the acquaintance of the intellectuals and artists of the time. He painted Roman motifs and landscapes in the Renaissance style , more as teaching pieces than as objects of his own work. His relationship with Giorgio de Chirico helped him transpose and transcend all of his previous work and begin the search for his own personality by turning his attention to the formulas of the painters of the twentieth century, especially the idea of metaphysics de Chirico's.
After returning from Rome to Spain, to do military service and - afterwards - to start a family, he settled in Paris. Under the influence of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, he decided to follow the path of Gauguin , which led him to Pont-Aven . There he realized an impressionist painting by taking up the rural theme and depicting typical Breton people and landscapes in a poetic way, albeit using atypical colors, which are more peculiar to the middle and south of France.
He decided to return to Paris and began to study graphic arts in the ateliers of La Curriere, from which engravings and lithographs by masters of the era (Picasso, Miró and others) came from. He enrolled in the Paris School, where he executed still lifes and human figures in a more expressionistic manner. During this time he met the group El Paso and Juana Mordó, which led him to informalism.
After two years of work, a crisis made him realize that this was not his style after all, and neither was his expression. He burned his, consisting of 128 individual pieces, and embarked on a surrealistic stage and its formal language, which changed his style and began with the work "Collision".
Return to Spain
In the early 1970s he returned to Bilbao with the intention of presenting his development to the Basques. In 1971 he took over the management of an art gallery in Bilbao, which he opened with an exhibition by Antonio Saura and a presentation by Santiago Amón. After a year of work, he decided to leave the gallery to devote all of his time to painting.
The 1970s were artistically productive, and after turning away from informalism, he began a new phase in which his aesthetics and discourse were transformed. Honors and exhibitions in Cáceres / Extremadura followed. The next stop was Collado Villalba near Madrid. Towards the end of the decade the “Gran Enciclopedia Vasca” ordered a bibliophile volume from him with the title “El Tarot”, consisting of 26 etchings.
Latin American era
At the beginning of the 1980s he traveled to Mexico to present his book "El Tarot". After the success he had achieved with this book, he was commissioned to create another book with graphics, this time on the subject of "La Tauromaquia", consisting of 23 etchings. He settled in Mexico, where he realized exhibitions, held lectures and also made a painting "en directo", i. H. the work was created right in front of the viewer's eyes.
During this entire decade, in his work, which had already undergone drastic developments, the symbols and the discourse changed following the expressionist path, but still within the surrealist formulas, until the series "Los Dioses" (The Gods) came to a conclusion (1987), a work that was more rooted in critical expressionism.
Towards the end of the 1980s, he decided to include waste products in his work and recycle them (wood, sheet metal, nails, hinges) by adding them to a much more critical work in which he integrated a whole series of characters, a new one Alphabet, with which he resolved to expose and criticize the amorality of society.
His paintings destroyed the mathematical symmetry of the canvas with the intention of making the meaningful weight of the picture and also the limitation that surrounds the work disappear. The most important works are the monumental paintings "El concierto de Salamanca" (a homage to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart) and "En recuerdo de Guernica" (In memory of Guernica).
In the mid-2000s he retired to the Dominican Republic , where he continued developing his humanistic philosophy, focusing on the disclosure of injustice and the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger. Here - after the series “Los Dioses” - he showed the value crisis of a society that destroys people whom it considers neither useful nor even capable after reaching a certain age (hence the use of waste materials). This is reflected in the exhibition “Mundos irreales” (Unreal Worlds), whereby he made use of an aesthetic that was easier to read than before.
Present in Germany
Martín Simón has lived in Germany since 2015.
In his current work he sticks to his humanistic philosophy, but one notices a change in his aesthetics. In contrast to the American world in which he had moved over the last decade and which produced the “Mundos Irreales”, he is now and feels himself to be in a tidier world, a more organized and structured one. With the use of purer colors, the work conveys a sense of a society with a more egalitarian structure. Nonetheless, in this work, in which a fundamental sociocultural analysis is always present, one can immediately see that he cannot be deterred from taking a critical stance on the conditions in which inequality is still evident.
Exhibitions
- 1956 Galería Artogar - Bilbao
- 1957 Galería Arte - Bilbao
- 1958 Colegio Español - Roma, Italia
- 1958 Grupo Culturale - Padova, Italia
- 1959 Galeria Jovane - Verona, Italia
- 1960 Opera Pia - Roma, Italia
- 1960 Galería Arte - Bilbao
- 1961 Espacio Arte - Gran Canaria
- 1963 Galeri de Tokyo - Bourdeaux, Francia
- 1964 Galeri Saint Michel - Paris, Francia
- 1966 Galeri Saint Michel - Paris, Francia
- 1968 Galería Juana Mordo - Madrid
- 1969 Galeri Saint Michel - Paris, Francia
- 1970 Galería Medina - Madrid
- 1972 Centro Cultural Extremeño
- 1974 Homenaje Exposición Museo de Cáceres
- 1974 Galería Berkobich - Madrid
- 1975 Galería Winsord - Bilbao
- 1976 Galería Zarte - Bilbao
- 1977 Galería Juana Mordo - Madrid
- 1978 Galería Artiberia - Logroño
- 1979 Instituto Cuyano de Cultura Hispana - Mendoza, Argentina
- 1980 Centro Cultural Hispano Mexicano - México DF
- 1981 Conferencia Expo en Ateneo Español - México DF
- 1984 Galeri Versalles - Orleans, Francia
- 1986 Esculturas Urbanas - Villalba, Madrid
- 1987 Ayuntamiento El Escorial - Esculturas
- 1988 Inauguración Casa Cultura - Villalba, Madrid
- 1990 Galería Década - Madrid
- 1991 Fundación BBVA
- 1992 Feria 5 ° Centenario - Seville
- 1993 Museos de: Cáceres - Mérida - Badajoz
- 1995 Stampa - Madrid
- 1995 Galería Fasbender - Chicago, Estados Unidos
- 1996 Museo de Arte Español - Miami, Estados Unidos
- 1997 Graf Zeppelin House - Friedrichshafen, Germany
- 1999 Art Forum - Berlín, Alemania
- 1999 ARCALE - Salamanca
- 1999 Batik International Art (Barcelona / New York / Miami) Lineart, Gent, Bélgica
- 2001 Museo de Vitoria
- 2001 Fundación Caja Duero, Salamanca
- 2003 ARCALE - Artista invitado, Salamanca
- 2006 Galería Monsequi - Madrid
- 2006 Galería Nou Milleni - Barcelona
- 2007 Iberarte - Zaragoza
- 2008 Galería Monsequi - Madrid
- 2009 Obispado - Conferencia / Exposición - Puntacana, República Dominicana
- 2013 Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales - Santo Domingo RD, República Dominicana
- 2014 MAM Museo de Arte Moderno - Santo Domingo, República Dominicana
- 2016 International Galeria Colonia - Colonia, Alemania
- 2016 Galerie Rouge - Remscheid Lennep, Germany
- 2017 Sankt Aposteln - Cologne, Germany
bibliography
- "Dibujos", JM Campoy
- “Los Pinceles de Vasconia”, Mario A. Marrodán
- “La Escultura Vasca”, Mario A. Marrodán
- “El Tarot”, Edición de Bibliófilo, Ed. La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, DL: BI-20-1980
- "La Tauromaquia", Edición de Bibliófilo, Gómez Egea. Ed. Lithos Mundi
- "Del Surrealismo hacia el futuro", Carlos G. Osuna, DL: M-33597-1989
- “Diálogos y Silencios”, Elias Amezaga y Carlos Aganzo, Ed. Sufi Ledo, 1990
- "Exposición Antológica", Cáceres-Mérida-Badajoz, 1993
- "Obra 1996-97" Editorial Grafismo
- "Obra 1996-1998", Christian Franco
- "Catálogo ART-FORUM", DL: M-34083, Berlín 1999
- "Exposición tres estaciones", M. Antolin, N. Artundo, Ed. Grafismo, DL: M-30090-2001
- “Tres épocas fundamentales”, Mario A. Marrodán y A. de Miguel, DL: Bi-58-05, 2005
- "Mundos irreales", Mario A. Marrodán u. a., Ed. Corripio, Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), 2014
- Martín Simón "The Cathedrals", Spanish Socio-Cultural Educational Organization NRW eV, 2017
Web links
- Homepage (English / Spanish)
- Biography on the website of the musician and artist colony Lennep
- Martín Simón on the website of the International Galeria Colonia
- Exhibition by José Martín Simón in Cologne
- Exhibition by José Martín Simón in Remscheid-Lennep
Individual evidence
- ^ Museo de Arte Moderno abre exposición del artista José de Martín Simón. 7días.com.do, February 14, 2014, accessed July 10, 2016.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Simón, José de Martín |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Simón, Martín |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Spanish painter and sculptor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 19, 1940 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Gata, Extremadura |