Benjamín Palencia

BENJAMÍN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 – Madrid, 1980).
Untitled.
Ink on paper.
Measurements: 21.3 x 16 cm; 42 x 37 cm (frame).

The work up for auction is fully integrated into Benjamín Palencia’s artistic universe, where figures are constructed from simplified, schematic forms that border on abstraction. Far from any realistic intent, these figures are reduced to essential geometric structures, in line with the trends of the 20th-century Spanish avant-garde, particularly approaches closely related to Cubism.

A founder of the Vallecas School alongside the sculptor Alberto Sánchez, Benjamín Palencia was one of the most important heirs to the Castilian landscape poetics characteristic of the Generation of ’98. At just fifteen years old, Palencia left his hometown and settled in Madrid to further his education through frequent visits to the Prado Museum, as he had always rejected the formal instruction offered by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. In 1925, he participated in the Exhibition of Iberian Artists held at the Palacio de El Retiro in Madrid, and in 1926 he traveled to Paris for the first time. There he met Picasso, Gargallo, and Miró and was introduced to the technique of collage, which he would later apply to his work by incorporating new materials such as sand and ashes. It was following this stay in Paris that Palencia’s work took on a surrealist tone, evident in an ever-increasing expressive freedom that would reach its full potential during his mature period. Upon his return to Madrid, he founded the Vallecas School (1927) and held his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1928). Palencia gradually moved away from still lifes to return to Castilian landscapes. This personal aesthetic of landscape painting would reach its culmination at the Vallecas School, and after a brilliant foray into Surrealism in the early 1930s, when the Civil War broke out, Palencia remained in Madrid, enduring—like his contemporaries—a period of profound crisis. After the war ended, between 1939 and 1940, his painting took a radical turn; he abandoned Cubist influences in search of an art form with a strong chromatic impact. Focusing on his work as a landscape painter, Palencia returned in 1942 to the Vallecas School alongside the young painters Álvar Delgado, Carlos Pascual de Lara, Gregorio del Olmo, Enrique Núñez Casteló, and Francisco San José. His work would feature images of the Castilian countryside, its peasants, and its animals; by 1943, having fully established himself, he won first prize at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts, and in 1944 he was selected to participate in Eugenio D’Ors’s Salón de los Once in Madrid. The following year, he was awarded the Medal of Honor at the National Exhibition, though he declined it so that it could be awarded to José Gutiérrez Solana, who had died days before the jury’s decision. Beginning in this decade, he held a series of exhibitions at art centers and galleries such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and the Estilo Gallery, and in 1946 he was once again selected for the Salón de los Once. He also began participating in international exhibitions, such as the Spanish Contemporary Art exhibitions held in Buenos Aires in 1947.