Ángeles Santos

ANGELES SANTOS TORROELLA (Portbou, 1911 - Madrid, 2013).
"Jardines del Retiro en Sitges", circa 1965/1966.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner. Titled on the back.
Size: 65 x 54 cm; 89 x 79 cm (frame).
Sitges was a place that the artist visited frequently, in fact, from the 70s onwards, the number of visits multiplied. The peacefulness of the area, its atmosphere and the light of the place were a source of inspiration for Ángeles Santos, who portrayed numerous views of the place. In this particular case, she shows a table with an empty chair in the foreground, a large grove of trees in the background and finally a view of the city buildings. The delicacy of the light tones and the fluidity of the brushstrokes make up a scene that offers us a reverie of reality, where the author manages to combine the genre of landscape, still life and vedutism through a few elements.
The work of Angeles Santos Torroella can be divided into three stages which correspond to the three cities where she lived, Valladolid, Madrid and Barcelona. In this case, this work corresponds to the last stage, which began in Barcelona. In which the artist, from 1969 onwards, began in the landscape genre, painting the cities of Paris, Barcelona, Cadaqués and Sitges through an aesthetic influenced by her reconciliation with the painter Emilio Grau.the 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-scale oil painting depicting a strange surrealist planet, now 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 about 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 held a solo exhibition in Paris and in 1932 she took part in the collective exhibition of Iberian Artists in San Sebastián, 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 included in the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale.