Benjamin Palencia

BENJAMIN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 - Madrid, 1980).
"Era" 40's.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Work verified by Ramón Palencia.
Measurements: 31 x 45 cm; 60 x 75 cm (frame).

In the forties, Benjamín Palencia's painting reaches full maturity when he knows how to subtract himself from cubist dogmas to return to a figuration of his own culture. He captures then the roughness of the peasant life during the postwar period, Castilian villages, corners that transmit an uncluttered and rough halo, although impregnated with feeling.

Founder of the School of Vallecas together with Alberto Sánchez, sculptor, Benjamín Palencia was one of the most important heirs of the poetics of the Castilian landscape typical of the Generation of '98. When he was only fifteen years old, Palencia left his hometown and settled in Madrid to develop his training through his frequent visits to the Prado Museum, since he always rejected the official teachings of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. In 1925 he participates in the Exhibition of Iberian Artists held at the Retiro Palace in Madrid, and in 1926 he travels for the first time to Paris. There he met Picasso, Gargallo and Miró and came into contact with the collage technique, which he would later apply to his work, incorporating new materials such as sand or ashes. It will be from this Parisian stay when Palencia's work acquires a surrealist tone, evidenced in an increasingly greater expressive freedom that will reach its fullness in his period of maturity. On his return to Madrid he founded the Vallecas School (1927), and made his individual debut at the Museum of Modern Art (1928). Palencia will gradually abandon still lifes to take up again the Castilian landscape, capturing it through a magnificent synthesis between tradition and avant-garde. This personal aesthetic of the landscape will reach its culmination in the School of Vallecas and, after a brilliant surrealist incursion in the early thirties, at the outbreak of the Civil War Palencia remains in Madrid, suffering like his peers of his generation a period of deep crisis. After the war, between 1939 and 1940 his painting took a radical turn; he abandoned the cubist and abstract influences and even the surrealist aspects, in search of an art of strong chromatic impact, linked to Fauvism. Focused on his work as a landscape painter, in 1942 Palencia takes up again the experience of the Vallecas School together with the young painters Álvar Delgado, Carlos Pascual de Lara, Gregorio del Olmo, Enrique Núñez Casteló and Francisco San José. His work will gather images of the Castilian countryside and its peasants and animals; his painting becomes a testimony of the rough, the coarse and the rural, of the subtle expressiveness of the Castilian sobriety. Already fully consolidated, in 1943 he obtained the first medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and in 1944 he was selected to participate in the Salón de los Once de Eugenio D'Ors in Madrid. The following year he is awarded the medal of honor at the National Exhibition, although he renounces it to facilitate its concession to José Gutiérrez Solana, who died a few days before the jury's decision. From this decade on, his exhibitions in art centers and galleries such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid or the Estilo gallery, and in 1946 he was once again selected for the Salón de los Once. He also began to participate in international exhibitions, such as those of Spanish Contemporary Art held in 1947 in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. He was also awarded the Grand Prize at the Hispano-American Biennial in Madrid (1951) and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (1951), the Venice Biennial (1956), the Princess of Paravinci's Palace in Rome (1965), etc. In 1973 he was appointed member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and in 1978 he joined the Academy of San Jorge in Barcelona. That same year he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts. Benjamín Palencia is currently represented in the Reina Sofía National Museum, in the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid and in the Fine Arts Museums of Valencia and Albacete, among many others.

COMMENTS

Work verified by Ramón Palencia.
This lot can be seen at the Setdart Valencia Gallery located at C/Cirilo Amorós, 55.