Born in Bilbao, García Ergüin has earned widespread recognition for his original and prolific practice. His style, difficult to pigeonhole within any specific movement, basically draws from Spanish tradition—his expressive brushwork speaks of the influence of El Greco (1541-1614) and Goya (1746-1828)—while at the same time he borrows elements from the various movements he discovered on his journeys throughout Spain, Europe and the USA.

García Ergüin is a restless artist who paints the places he visits, among which the landscapes of Castile and the Spanish coast, particularly those of Lanzarote and the Basque Country, play a prominent role. That is the case of the work in hand, which depicts the beach in Hendaye. An excellent example of the painter’s stylistic evolution, this painting, executed in the early 1990s, opened up a period of fertile work and critical acclaim in which the artist depicted coastal scenes on many occasions. García Ergüin began to paint the beaches of Hendaye during the time spent there in an apartment owned by his family. This subject matter underwent a noteworthy development in his art production following his later move to Lanzarote, where he set up a studio.

In Grey Pink Beach, the artist created a work with great visual impact and utmost painterly elegance, in which he combines a highly lyrical blurred background with the figurative references offered by the mound sticking out in the horizon (revealing the actual location) and the vaguely sketched bathers. The loose and energetic brushwork evinces the artist’s technical mastery but also his heightened sensibility. The end result is a sublime landscape.

Particularly eloquent is the palette chosen to depict the light and colour of the Cantabrian Sea (announced in the title of the work), clearly contrasting with the tones used to portray the Atlantic in the Canary Islands as seen in Green Yellow Light (Inv. no. P03586), also in the BBVA Collection.