Juan Navarro Baldeweg

JUAN NAVARRO BALDEWEG (Santander, 1930).
"Greek profile", 1981.
Oil on canvas.
Provenance: Anders Tornberg Gallery, Lund, Sweden; Uppsala, Sweden. "Modern & Contemporary Sale, 5 2018 and Private Collection Madrid.
Signed "NB" and dated in the lower left corner.
Size: 195 x 150,5 cm.
In this piece of large dimensions through an expressive brushstroke in accordance with the chosen tonalities, characteristic of the work the artist, Navarro, introduces in a metaphorical way, thanks to the title, the classical statuary. With a geometric form as the protagonist of the work, he manages to reduce to the maximum the concepts developed by classical art, where proportion, symmetry and a certain idealism were fundamental in the conception of a "Greek profile".
An architect, painter and sculptor, Navarro Baldeweg studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and engraving at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. In 1974 he received a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation to study postgraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a student of Gyorgy Kepes. He has been a visiting professor at Philadelphia, Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Barcelona, and is a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.despite his architectural training, Navarro Baldeweg considers himself a painter rather than an architect.he has defined painting as enigmatic and mysterious, a field where there is greater creative freedom. His pictorial work oscillates between the abstract paintings of the sixties, the thematic series of the eighties and the more contemporary landscapes, showing throughout his artistic production a great interest in the study of colour. In this canvas we can observe the coexistence between a figuration of synthetic lines and abstraction, achieved through the great role played by colour in the piece. Navarro Baldeweg has received the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1990), the Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal (1998), the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2007) and the Gold Medal for Spanish Architecture (2008). He is represented in the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the Artium in Vitoria, the MEIAC in Badajoz, the Museo Colecciones ICO, the Fundación Juan March, the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid and the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, among other public and private collections.