Angeles Santos

ANGELES SANTOS TORROELLA (Portbou, 1911 - Madrid, 2013).
"Study of the painter".
Oil on canvas.
Presents restoration on the side.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 92 x 73 cm; 122,5 x 103 cm (frame).
With only twenty years old Ángeles Santos pronounced these words; "My work is only what women can do... it is to be close to realities while painting". Despite her Juventus, she had already achieved great recognition, being admired by the cultural elite of the time. With this phrase, Santos predicted an uncertain and difficult future, completely dedicated to painting. This work, which belongs to a stage of maturity, is nothing more than a tribute to his profession, as it gives all the prominence to the painter's temple, "his studio". In the door you can see a figure sketched without identity, as the artist focuses her interest in architecture, located in a lonely landscape and away from civilization. A quiet and peaceful space.
The work of Angeles Santos Torroella can be divided into three stages that correspond to the three cities where she lived, Valladolid, Madrid and Barcelona. In this case this work corresponds to the last stage started in Barcelona. In which the artist, starting in 1969, began in the genre of landscapes, painting the cities of Paris, Barcelona, Cadaqués and Sitges through an aesthetic influenced by her reconciliation with the painter Emilio Grau.sister of the poet and art critic Rafael Santos Torroella, she began drawing and painting at the age of fourteen during her school years at the boarding school of the Conceptionist Slaves of Seville. Two years later he moved with his parents to Valladolid, where he was taught by the Italian painter Cellino Perotti and painted, at the age of 18, "Un mundo", a large format oil painting representing a strange surrealist planet, currently kept in the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.After a couple of exhibitions in Valladolid, his participation in the IX Salón de Otoño in Madrid in 1929, increased his fame, resulting in the publication of articles that gave reason for his painting (half expressionist, half surrealist) by intellectuals and critics such as Jorge Guillén, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Manuel Abril, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, Joan Teixidor, among others. In 1931 she had a solo exhibition in Paris and, in 1932, she participated in the collective of Iberian Artists in San Sebastian, Copenhagen and the French capital. The following year she was invited to exhibit in the group show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (USA) and in 1936 she was part of the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale.