Regionalist Realisms
Asorey • Xosé Eiroa • Cristino Mallo • Antón Faílde • Camilo Nogueira • Uxío Souto • Bonome • Narciso Pérez • Compostela • Acuña • Madariaga • Arturo Baltar • A. Vilar Lamelas
ISBN: 84-96070-28-X
This volume gathers a series of artists that have been extremely important in the innovative process of the Galician sculpture that was previous to the Civil War in 1936, a process that is parallel to the avant-garde rebirth of the Os Novos generation in painting -our particular 1927 generation, which contrasts with the previous modernism- whose protagonists offer a moderate view from stylistic positions based on a tradition that rebels against the costumbrist topic and admits the interference of certain realities of the contemporary isms, mainly of the Expressionism and the figurative reviews of the Cubism.
We will have to look for the genesis of these artists in some constants that mark the specificity of their work: in tradition, which goes back to the forts’ quarrymen and to all the stoneworkers, to those who carved the popular religious images in tympana, stone crosses, capitals, etc. Granite and wood will be their basic materials. The formal references to the Romanesque and the Baroque are product of an investigation, linked to the origin of what they consider an artistic identity, which is to discover the anthropological essences of the countryside, the roots of a millenary culture that leads us to the primitivism that is reflected in the formal style: the sculptor is, above all, a good psychologist and, as such, he deepens in the soul of that timeless portrait that places us in Galicia and in the world at the same time.
Figurations- Abstractions
Juan Oliveira • Eiravella • Buciños • Camilo Otero • Elena Colmeiro • Xosé Cid • Acisclo Manzano • Manuel Coia • Xoán Piñeiro • J. L. Penado • Jesús Valverde • Otero Besteiro • Ferreiro Badía
ISBN: 84-96070-11-5
The sculptors included in this volume are extremely important in the evolution of the Galician art during the three last decades and, mainly, during the 1960s and 1970s. They are the protagonists of the transformation that took place inside the traditional direct carving in favour of a wider conception, both in the poetics of the shapes and the styles that are in tune with the international contexts of the avant-garde and of other materials, among which some historical ones, like the bronze or the clay, become very important, as well as the most experimental ones, like iron, steel, concrete and the industrial ones. This also happens in the consideration of sculpture as a public monument and in the option of the innovated poetics of the space, nature or the disappearance of the base at the end of the 1970s.
So, the thirteen sculptors that we include are not only thirteen proofs of the divergence or the plurality of styles that existed in Galicia in the last forty years. They are also symptoms of a necessary dialogue, in terms of an artistic style, between this Northwest and the world, that is to say, between the territory that gives them a cultural filiation and a mark of tradition, and the aesthetic experiences that defined the international art during the last half of the century.
Realisms-Abstractions
Soledad Penalta • Xuxo Vázquez Pardo • José Galán Suárez • Pedro Dobao • Suso Fernández • Álvaro de la Vega • José Castiñeiras Iglesias • Ramón Conde • Ángeles Valladares • Magín Picallo Durán • Xosé Manuel Castro • Lomarti • María Carretero • Francisco Pazos Pazos • José Antúnez Pousa
ISBN: 84-96070-61-1

These are fifteen artistic projects placed among the review of sculpture, the innovation of tradition, the look to nature, the review of the relationships between man and space, the recovery of the human figure, the break with the limits of the sculpture or the Eclecticism. The formal analysis is between the most realist figuration and the abstraction, between the constructive shapes and the biomorphic ones. They use a great deal of materials: granite, steel and even waste materials like windshields of destroyed cars.
Expressionisms-
Abstractions
Francisco Leiro • Paco Pestana • Mon Vasco • Fernando Casás • Manolo Paz • Ignacio Basallo • Xavier Toubes • Xurxo Oro Claro • Luis Borrajo • Enrique Velasco • Manuel Patinha • Moncho Amigo
ISBN: 84-96070-90-5
The appropriate aesthetic framework to place the work of the sculptors included in this book is the one of the vicissitudes of the last twenty-five years in Europe. This was the crucial horizon in the transformation of the art in Galicia. It is in this moment that the protagonists break the traditional limits of their styles and opt for experimental ones. These allows us to compare their projects with the international ones. The twelve artists show not only the most interesting part of the Galician sculpture after the Civil War, but they have been able to introduce their interest in other fields through their works that are very different. Except Mon Vasco -deceased- all of them are in the zenith of their creative maturity and have been able to respond to the new approaches of a sculpture that is experiencing the dissolution of the traditional genres, even in such an important dialogue as the one that confronts the public dimension of the latter with the city or with nature.