Menchu Gal

MENCHU GAL (Irún, Guipúzcoa, 1919 – San Sebastián, 2008).
“Bay of Fuenterrabía and Mount San Marcial.”
Watercolor on paper.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 43 x 59 cm.

This watercolor belongs to one of the most personal themes in Menchu Gal’s body of work: the landscape of the Bidasoa River and the Basque coast, a region closely linked to her life story and a recurring motif throughout her career. The view of Fuenterrabía allows her to bring together the vastness of the mountainous landscape, the town’s architecture, and the activity in the bay, combining a sense of local roots with pictorial modernity.

The artist builds depth through broad, overlapping bands, from the boats in the foreground to the farmhouse and the hills in the background. The transparency inherent to watercolor is combined with denser, more energetic brushstrokes, especially in the mountains, where violets, greens, and blues depart from a naturalistic interpretation. This chromatic freedom, an essential characteristic of her artistic language, transforms the recognizable view into a composition with a marked plastic rhythm and remarkable freshness.

Although oil painting was her predominant medium, Menchu Gal also pursued watercolor to a significant degree—in 1954 she won the Grand Prize for Watercolor at the Second International Caribbean Art Biennial—a technique particularly well-suited to conveying the immediacy of gesture, transparency, and her characteristic chromatic freedom in her landscapes.

Menchu Gal was a leading figure in the renewal of postwar Spanish landscape painting and was associated with the so-called Madrid School. Initially trained by Gaspar Montes Iturrioz, she furthered her studies in Paris with Amédée Ozenfant and at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. In 1959, she became the first woman to win the National Prize for Painting. Her work is part of the collections of the Reina Sofía National Art Museum and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.