20200910_MUN_ExhibitionIsabelBaquedano

The Museum of Navarre and the University Museum of Navarre have inaugurated this Thursday Of Beauty and the Sacredthe first retrospective of the Navarrese painter Isabel Baquedano (Mendavia, 1929 - Madrid, 2018), one of the most personal artists of Spanish painting in the second half of the 20th century. The sample, which can be visited at both venues until January 10, has been co-produced with the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, where it was exhibited last spring.

It is the first time that can be seen in Pamplona the different periods of work of the artist, preeminent figure of the so-called School of Pamplona and professor of painting at the School of Arts and Crafts of the capital of Navarre. There she was the teacher of most of the contemporary Navarrese painters.

The pathway begins with the drawings and works from the early 50's, which open the exhibition in the Museum of Navarra. In total, 290 works from the artist's collection, museums, foundations and private collections are on display. In addition to the paintings, photographs, drawings and documents are exhibited that allow to deepen in Baquedano's trajectory. In the words of Ángel Bados, curator of the sample together with Miriam Alzuri, the aritsta was "owner of a clean and decisive drawing and dazzling color, the artist knew how to work with speed and intensity in the search for her own style".

The tour allows to know the artisticdevelopment of Baquedano, whose work evolves in a few years from the realistic figuration of social content to iconographies of great formal Economics , close in some aspects to Pop art. It was in the 1970s when his works reached a certain realist plenitude.

Despite the changes in technique in the different periods, the works exhibited in both venues maintain the same biographical function, "as if the lived and the painted were correlative. This leads us to think that painting allowed him to take a symbolic position in the world and with others, making the viewer a participant in his adventure, through the latent enigma of the paintings and through their own rare beauty," Bados emphasizes.

Baquedano was evolving in his work , imbibing the different currents in force in his time, within his general interest in Art History, but interpreting them in a way staff, always moved by his will to learn and enjoy the pictorial process more than the final result , without caring neither the recognition nor the fame. His work covers a diverse range of subjects, from the themes with a clear social component of his early periods, to those linked to the classical world or the sacred history of his final stage, passing through others linked to symbolic aesthetics, urban landscapes or his everyday environment.