Basque Art in the BBVA Collection

The goal of this exhibition is to underscore the specific weight within the BBVA Collection of artists from or associated with the Basque Country. With this purpose in mind, and spanning over one century of art history, the show takes a walkthrough of different expressions of Basque art which have had a decisive influence on the renewal of the arts in Spain as a whole.

We start with a selection of regionalist painting spurred by a newfound interest in recovering traditions and in restoring Basque identity; this is well represented by artists such as José Echenagusía, Valentín de Zubiaurre and Anselmo Guinea, among others. This desire to return to regional themes coincided with a yearning to modernize art among a number of practitioners who, during the changeover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, had entered into direct contact with European movements: Francisco Iturrino, Aurelio Arteta, Ignacio Zuloaga or Darío de Regoyos introduced new models on which the foundations of the future were laid. And so, from the twenties until the late-fifties, there arose a group of painters, influenced by Daniel Vázquez Díaz, who provided continuity to this transformation, thus giving shape to a new language based on a personal interpretation of the avant-gardes, as is the case of José María Ucelay and Gaspar Montes Iturrioz.

It would not be until the mid-twentieth century when one of the most important artistic innovations finally made its mark: the development of abstract art, led by artists like the brothers Eduardo and Gonzalo Chillida, who wished to move away from the purely material towards something altogether more intangible. As a reaction to this movement, throughout the following decades of the seventies and eighties some artists, including Jesús Mari Lazcano and Juan Ramón Luzuriaga, turned towards figurative expression in order to recover the legacy of Basque art but with a more realist aesthetic.

At the same time, a number of painters continued working in a style removed from figuration yet still directly connected with international postmodern trends, bringing new contemporary languages to bear on local art. In this group we could name Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea, Alfonso Bonifacio, Daniel Tamayo and Darío Villalba. Within this continuity, but marking a distance with the excessive coldness of prevailing
, the closing decades of the twentieth century saw a shift to more
, which aspired to represent nature through landscapes with a strong poetic character, as exemplified by artists like Marta Cárdenas, Gonzalo Chillida, Darío Urzay and Ignacio García Ergüin, with which the exhibition draws to a conclusion.