MARCO dedicates an extensive exhibition to Juan Giralt

From September 22 to February 25, MARCO in Vigo presents an exhibition of Juan Giralt curated by Marcos Giralt Torrente and Miguel Fernández-Cid. This exhibition is the most extensive to date dedicated to Juan Giralt (Madrid, 1940-2007), one of the most evocative and unique artists of the pictorial generation that took center stage in Spain at the turn of the century. A virtuoso of color, reactive to solemnity and fond of humor and metapictorial play, Juan Giralt soon demonstrated a will to research, to escape from stereotypes and pigeonholes, which would lead him to experiment with various languages.

Formed in the informalism of the fifties of the last century, he participated in the generational break with this movement from the middle of the following decade, when he evolved from post-CoBrA expressionism to a neofiguration of pop resonances that would convert him, entering the seventy, in one the main referents of the Spanish artistic scene.

Along with his mastery of color and plasticity, Giralt usually stands out for the solidity of his pictorial commitment, the fact that, without being alien to the currents of his time, he managed to form a fully recognizable language, in which abstraction and the figurative, cerebral and intuitive reference, the neatness of the drawing and the unctuousness of the painting, the expressiveness of the gesture and the formal analysis of the geometrizing tendency coexist, not without friction, in a delicate balance that seems to multiply inwards the surface of the work.

This integrative drive, already perceptible in his experimental work of the 1980s, would crystallize with all resounding in his splendid last twenty years of career.

The exhibition briefly reviews the previous stages of his work and focuses on these years of fullness, between the late eighties and his death in 2007, in which his style reached a classic weight. The imprint of his uninhibited eclecticism and his peculiar treatment of the pictorial space, to which he incorporates the technique of collage, can be traced in many subsequent artists. Wire painting, built in sight, of synthesis, of conciliation between extremes, intellectual and cold, but at the same time strongly emotional, sprinkled with painted words, of objects evoked from everyday life, of windows after which they hint at hills, of pieces of advertising posters, of school sheets, of photos...

Painter of painters, respected and influential, Juan Giralt has not obtained the projection that his brilliant career deserves. With this exhibition, which brings together works on canvas and paper in small and large format, the MARC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, joins the effort to vindicate it.