This exhibition, organized by BBVA, takes us on a fascinating journey of over one hundred years of Basque art, underscoring the notable presence of artists from or connected with the Basque Country in the BBVA Collection.

Divided into seven sections, the show gathers an interesting selection of forty artworks from the BBVA’s holdings, made up of paintings, drawings, graphic work and sculptures, together outlining a route from nineteenth-century regionalist painting all the way through the various movements that took place during the twentieth century. Overall, the works evince the breadth of different tendencies that have shaped the art scene in the Basque Country over the last two centuries, in turn exerting a major influence on art in Spain as a whole.

Analogies. Basque Art in the BBVA Collection opens with works of genre painting by artists such as Anselmo Guinea, Valentín de Zubiaurre and Manuel Losada, which gave way to a process of renewal led by artists who had been in contact with European modernist movements during the period of the changeover between centuries. This is the case of Darío de Regoyos, Aurelio Arteta, Francisco Iturrino and Ignacio Zuloaga, who all played a key role in transforming art at the time.

The exhibition continues with many of the tendencies that held sway during the first half of the twentieth century, with a return to Basque subject matters, although now addressed through a new optic, as is well illustrated in the paintings by Gaspar Montes Iturrioz and José María Ucelay. This survey is brought to a close with a series of works by Jorge Oteiza, Eduardo Chillida, Jesus Mari Lazkano, Bonifacio Alfonso, Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea, Mari Puri Herrero and Darío Urzay, among others, that bear testimony to the introduction of international art movements into the Basque Country during the second half of the century, favouring a coexistence of all kinds of different abstract and figurative practices.