ArtistUbeda, Augustin

Artist Years1925-2007

Artist NationalitySpanish, French

TitleEl Amor es un Sol

Year1957

MediumPainting > Oil

DimensionsCanvas: 11 X 14 inches

Accession NumberRC1324

NotesAgustín Úbeda was a Spanish painter. Due to his pictorial style, halfway between figurative expressionism and surrealism, he has been framed within the so-called Madrid School and Paris School.

He began his artistic training in 1944, at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, in Madrid, where he was a disciple of painters such as Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Eugenio Hermoso and Joaquín Valverde Lasarte, and where, in 1948, he obtained the title of drawing teacher. His debut as a painter took place at the Casino de Alcázar de San Juan, Ciudad Real, in 1949. Three years later, he held his first personal exhibition, at the Galería Xagra in Madrid.

Thanks to a scholarship from the French Institute, in 1953, Úbeda settled in Paris, the city where he would reside for two decades. Precisely in Paris, he consecutively won two awards at the Certamen de la Jeune Peinture Française, created by the Parisian gallery Drouant-David, where painters such as Maurice Boitel and Bernard Buffet hung their paintings, and where he himself ended up exhibiting regularly his work. It was then that he joined the School of Paris.

It was also in Paris where Úbeda progressively distanced himself from his youthful period—influenced by the pictorial style of his teacher Daniel Vázquez Díaz and that of Benjamín Palencia, to soak up the poetic and expressionist baroqueism that identifies the painting of Chagall or the Picasso himself. After this Parisian stage, he returned in 1974, hired as a professor, by what is now the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid. In those years, the exhibitions held in Madrid by the Biosca Gallery projected him internationally, making his paintings reach the United States, the world pole of contemporary art at the end of the 70s.

In his teaching role, Agustín Úbeda was an emeritus professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and a full member of the Royal Academy of Doctors of Spain. Among the awards and recognition that he received throughout his career, in addition to those from the Jeune Peinture Française, the Grand Prize for Painting from the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid stands out in 1980.

Agustín Úbeda held exhibitions in different Spanish cities, as well as in others in France, Switzerland and the United States. In 1992, he participated alongside painters such as Luis García-Ochoa Ibáñez and Antonio Guijarro, in the group exhibition Ten masters of figurative expressionism in Spain, which took place at the Orfila Art Gallery in Madrid. Individually, it is worth highlighting the retrospective that, in 1998 and covering his artistic creation during the period 1944-1988, organized by the Cultural Center of the City of Madrid. Also in that same year, he exhibited at the Caja de San Fernando in Seville an anthological exhibition, composed of 35 paintings, representative of what were always his most recurrent themes: landscape, the female nude and still life.

A good part of Agustín Úbeda's work currently appears in seventy European and American museums, among which, in Spain, stand out: the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Museum of Fine Arts in Jaén, the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Engraving in Marbella , the Modern Art of Valdepeñas, the Municipal of Toledo, the Camón Aznar of Zaragoza and the Provincial of Ciudad Real; in Europe: the Musée de la Ville de Gèneve and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris; and, finally, in the United States: those in New Mexico, San Diego, Phoenix, the Lowe-Art Museum in Miami and the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science in Indiana.
(source: wikipedia.org)