20th Century Spanish

Born in 1905 in Jacarilla (Alicante). A painter and shepherd from his native village of Jacarilla, after receiving basic artistic tuition thanks to the patronage of the Marquis of Fontalba, Gálvez Roch was able to enrol at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. On finishing his academic training, he returned to Alicante, where he set up his own studio and painted the majority of his output.

He cultivated all the most popular genres of the time namely portraits, landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes, within an academicist style. In this way, he was able to expand his client base which was basically interested in his still lifes, portraits and Mediterranean landscapes, characterised by a special and highly personal treatment of light.

He submitted his work to many exhibitions, including the in 1930 and the 1st Bienal Hispanoamericana held in Madrid in 1951, where he won a medal. That same year he also took part in the Bienal del Reino de Valencia, following which his work was exhibited at Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and in many other Spanish cities.

He died on 4 March 1991 in Alicante. A retrospective exhibition of his life’s work was organised in Orihuela in 2006, on the fifteenth anniversary of his death, as a tribute.