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Young Adults

Artistas Galegos Pintores - Neoexpresionismos Abstraccións

By VV.AA.

About this book

The twelve artists included in this book are an example, amongst others, of the transformation of painting in the last twenty years of the 20th century. Their starting point is the so-called atlantismo. When we speak about atlantismo, we refer to a whole generation of artists who appear at the beginning of the 80s. The reference framework for all of them was a society that tried to be part of Europe and contemporaneity after long years of dull dictatorship: these are the seeds for a change in language. At the same time, interesting aesthetic models developed in Europe with the avant-garde movements of the end of the seventies. Within the last quarter of the century, these artists produced important work within the context of the recovery from neo-expressionism, with its self-proclaimed freedom from ideology. These artists emerged with a more clear ideology and greater commitment to the contemporary world.

Book fragment

... In that existential atmosphere in Galicia during the first five years of the 80s, between different events, such as the appearance of the Atlantica group, the regeneration of the Bienal of Pontevedra and the internationalisation of those events or the creation of a Section of Plastic Arts under the regional government, the atlantismo was an identifying trait of the new art that tried to reinforce its aesthetic signs according to the concerns of the return to Europe. This concern meant that previous languages of historic avant-gardes had to be studied –especially the expressionist trends according to the different national traditions in different countries- and combined with a will to be in the world. Integration was conceived as part of a philosophy that demanded new readings of different pasts and traditions, something that could bring back with further strength the model of the Galician renewers of the first third of the century, when they invented the aesthetics of granite: an amalgam of a differential aesthetic past –from the primitivism of Neolithic carvings or pre-historic petrogliphs to a cultured and popular Romanesque, translated into capitols and tympanums- to a liberated vision of the languages of the expressionist avant-gardes or action painting…