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https://www.coleccionbbva.com/es/autor/zumeta-jose-luis/
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José Luis Zumeta
(Usurbil, Guipúzcoa, 1939 - San Sebastian, 2020)
Author's artworks
20
th
-21
st
Century. Spanish
José Luis Zumeta’s first incursions into the art world took place when the painter was still in his teens. At the age of fourteen he enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts in San Sebastian and in several courses imparted at the Guipuzcoa Artists Association. That same year he also started working at Gráficas Valverde, the graphic arts company where he accrued direct experience in the various printing techniques.
His sojourn in Paris in 1959 proved instrumental for his later career. There he got in touch with other fellow painters from San Sebastian and was introduced to the happening trends of the time through artists that would have a profound influence on his style: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) as well as the
CoBrA group
Group of nordic artists that got together in 1948 in Paris in order to promote an experimental way of creating art. This new approach was based on the individual expression of the author. Their main promoters were the artists Asger Jorn (1914-1973), Karel Appel Constant (1921-2006) y Conreille (1922-2010) and the writers Christian Dotremont y Joseph Noiret. The name of the group responds to the initial letters of their cities of origin (Copenhaguen, Brussels y Amsterdam). The works by these artists are influenced by Nordic Expressionism and by Jean Dubuffet’s (1901-1985) Informalism. Their art has been related to American action painting as it proposes a plastic language based in spontaneity, color, material and gesture.
, especially Karel Appel (1921-2006), one of
the group’s co-founders. Back in Spain he began to collaborate with the sculptor Remigio Mendiburu (1931-1990) and he had his first solo exhibition at the Municipal Art Hall of San Sebastian in 1962. By this time, his painting had already embraced a brand of abstraction built through horizontal stripes rendered in pure colours.
In 1966, as an active member of the
Basque School Movement
a movement that emerged in 1966 in the Basque Country, consisting mainly of three different groups: Gaur (Today) from Gipuzkoa, Emen (Here) from Biscay and Orain (Now) from Alava. Promoted by the artists Agustín Ibarrola and Jorge Oteiza, the movement focused its activity on a defence of Basque avant-garde art. The collective was soon affected by internal disagreements that ended in its disbandment in the same year it had been created.
, he and other
informel
artists from Guipuzcoa founded the
Gaur Group
An artists’ collective founded around the Basque School to bring together the artists from the province of Biscay. It was created in 1966 to defend contemporary art outside official circles, which would defend the formal and conceptual transformation of art as well as of cultural activities connected to art. The works by the members of the group had a strong political intent. The group was made up by Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), Néstor Basterretxea (1924-2014), Remigio Mendiburu (1931-1990), Amable Arias (1927-1984), Rafael Ruiz Balerdi (1934-1992), José Antonio Sistiaga (1932) and José Luis Zumeta (1939), and disbanded two years after it was set up.
, with whom he would exhibit his work until it disbanded in 1969. He was also involved in other collective attempts to connect Basque art, then deeply rooted in the local tradition, with the international art scene, perhaps most famously the 1972
Encuentros de Pamplona
An arts festival held in the city of Pamplona from 26 June through 3 July 1972 in which over 350 Spanish and international artists took part. In their works, these artists explored the cutting-edge expressions of the time such as video, happenings, conceptualism and sound poetry, with an emphasis on their processual nature. Their practices were grounded in experimentation, seeking to strike up a dialogue with the audience and with the public space, and between various disciplines and also between the avant-garde and popular tradition. The event, privately funded by Luis de Pablo and José Luis Alexanco, is often viewed as a watershed moment marking the end of the grip that informalist painting and abstraction had held over Spanish art.
. It was also around this time when he started teaching.
Among the works Zumeta produced in 1967-1968, a particular mention is deserved for his reliefs based on the arrangement of wooden planes, where his experimentation with organic forms and bright tones is already noticeable. These features would become recurrent in his later painting, albeit rendered in more flexible, richer and complex brushwork. After a period dominated by grey matter-based backdrops and defined by more highly organized and simplified composition (1975-1977), in 1978 there was a certain rapprochement with
Pop Art
An art movement that emerged at the same time in the United Kingdom and the United States in the mid-twentieth century, as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. The movement drew its inspiration from the aesthetics of comics and advertising, and functioned as a critique of consumerism and the capitalist society of its time. Its greatest exponents are Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) in England and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) in the United States.
. Zumeta’s work took an eminently figurative approach—his pieces would always be half-way between abstraction and figuration—and engaged in social critique. It would not be until 1989 when his work would be considered wholly abstract again.
As from the 1980s onwards the artist exhibited his work regularly in many shows, most notably in the retrospective held in 1990 at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao and Museo San Telmo in San Sebastian, where he had presented his work on previous occasions. Throughout the following years his practice underwent constant transformation, with the artist involved in the most varied projects, including his participation in
Izenik Gabe 200x133
(Untitled 200x133), a documentary exploring his creative process.
José Luis Zumeta died at the age of eighty-one at his home in San Sebastian. He is now recognized as a key player in the Basque artistic avant-garde whose extensive, wide-ranging work, always predicated on the expressiveness of colour, was essential in overcoming the isolation and conservatism of post-war Spain.