Teresa González Gancedo (1937) - Sin título

\Artist: Teresa González Gancedo (1937)
Technique: Mixed media\Signature: Hand signed\Dimensions: 48_3_40_cm
Signed on the bottom left, with date Teresa González Gancedo (Tejedo del Sil. León. 1937) has been marked by the passion for the painter. She came to the world in the middle of the civil war and in a mountainous village of Alto Sil, straddling the mining basins of Laciana and El Bierzo, where all her roots are, both on the part of mother and father. The lyric painter, as Antonio Gamoneda says, was almost born with brushes in her hands. "At the age of three or four," he says, she was already drawing. "I preferred to paint than to go play, it's like a fever; the same as with those who prefer to play chess," she says with total naturalness. When she was studying high school at a nuns' school in Madrid, her passion for drawing earned her a punishment more than once, and being labelled a 'bad student', a title she shared with Pilar Bardem, who was her classmate at that boarding school. Teresa Gancedo was able to lead a life as a "good lady" because "I got married very young, when I was 21," she says, and her husband was a well-connected agricultural engineer, at the service of the Barcelona Gardens. But she wanted to "paint, paint and paint", so went on her way. After becoming a mother, she had two children, she decided to enrol in the San Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. After finishing, she was given the School Medal for Drawing, the most difficult subject and the one that this Leonese was best at. In 1972, when she was 35 years old, she held her first exhibition in the Sala Provincia de León, invited by Antonio Gamoneda (2006 Cervantes Prize) who managed back then the cultural institution of the León Provincial Council. Shortly after, the prestigious gallery owner Fernando Vijande chose her for his portfolio of artists and Margit Rowell, international curator, selected her to participate in the New Images from Spain exhibition that was held in 1980, at the Guggenheim in New York. ¨We were two women and eight men¨, she recalls. In this way, she became, together with the artist Carmen Calvo, the first Spanish woman to have an exhibition at the prestigious New York museum. Since then she has held more than a hundred exhibitions and her work has reached different countries in Europe and America. Her unique and personal style, an intimate world, with dreamlike overtones, but with a universal story, have turned her into a difficult artist to label. Conceptual, symbolist and even realistic are some of the adjectives that have been given to her. "Women in general have a very surreal side," she admits, "because it has always been very hidden". So much so that women, to create their works did not mind using the kitchen, she points out, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf. Teresa Gancedo also confessed to be a fervent admirer of Hieronymus Bosch and she has been since she was very young. When she was very young, her family moved to live in Madrid. She recalls "my father used to take us to the Prado Museum every Sunday, he said that it never ends, and I used to always ask him to go see Bosch: for me he was the first surrealist," she explains. Gancedo defines her plastic work as «a tremendous effort to grasp reality: I say to grasp, that is, to assume it, to internalize it, to pass it through the sieve of my expectations, memories, unconscious part of my being, and then show it with all those strange discoveries that arise from the fusion of the two realities: the external given and the internal felt». And the reality of her childhood, lived on a horseback between Madrid and Tejedo del Sil, where she still keeps the family home, has had a determining influence on the work of this woman who, without being a believer, drinks from the fountains of popular Christian culture and the rural traditions that marked her early years: "The happiest days of my life I spent in Tejedo del Sil," she says. She contemplated masses, processions and rituals "not as something sinister, but even joyful. Even the relationship with death in which everyone in the village comforted those who suffered a loss, has nothing to do with how it is lived today," she adds. These experiences also aroused her interest in religious art, a subject with which she culminated her doctoral thesis. In 1982, she became a professor at the faculty where she had studied. A few years ago, she returned to León, on the hands of Marga Carnero and Asun Robles, the owners of Gallery Ármaga, where Teresa Gancedo presented her latest work during the month of April. Forty-five years after her baptism in the Sala Provincia, the work of the most international Leonese painter has also aroused the interest of institutions, such as the Musac. Invisible women in painting The fact that women have not had as much projection as artists as men does not mean that they do not have skills, says Teresa Gancedo. "When I was a teacher, I had better female students than male students," she states. But the reality is that ¨women have had it very difficult and the great female artists we know, like Frida Khalo, have been tied to a husband or a lover¨. The same thing happened to female writers, although Gancedo believes that references such as Virginia Woolf have opened the way in writing for many women. "Nowadays, in painting, women are also pulling, but it's still difficult", she adds. "I am sure that there are many works from the Gothic and other eras that were made by women and we do not know about", she stresses.