Pilar Álvarez de Sotomayor

PILAR ÁLVAREZ DE SOTOMAYOR (A Coruña, 1908- Torrent, Valencia, 1993).
"Young man in the port".
Oil on canvas.
Presents stamp on the back of Victor Claessens.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 80 x 70 cm; 92 x 82 cm (frame).
Pilar Álvarez de Sotomayor y Castro was an outstanding Spanish painter whose artistic career is closely linked to the legacy of her father, the renowned painter Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor. Daughter of a master painter and born into a family deeply sensitive to the arts, Pilar assumed from an early age a natural inclination towards plastic creation, which would end up becoming a vital vocation.
In her childhood, the family moved to Santiago de Chile due to the professional commitments of her father, who at that time was the director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile. This stay in South America, although brief, offered the young Pilar her first contact with diverse cultural contexts. In 1915, the Álvarez de Sotomayor family returned to Spain, settling again in Galicia. It was in this new context that Pilar formally began her artistic training, receiving her first painting lessons from her own father, whose influence was not only technical, but also aesthetic and spiritual.
In 1927, when she was only nineteen years old, she presented her work publicly for the first time. The exhibition, modestly organized in the shop window of the Casa Tizón commercial establishment in A Coruña, included a painting entitled A Slavic Princess, which already revealed a narrative sensibility and an inclination for figurative art that would accompany much of her work.
Eager to broaden her educational horizons and in keeping with the artistic habits of her time, in 1932 she moved to Paris, then the epicenter of the European avant-garde. Although not much information is preserved from this stage, it is likely that there she came into contact with new aesthetic currents that, directly or indirectly, enriched her pictorial language. On his return to Spain, he resumed his exhibition activity and shared space with his sisters Carmen and Rosario in a group exhibition organized by the Association of Artists of A Coruña, thus consolidating a family creative dynamic that had germinated in the domestic sphere.
A decisive event in the life of Pilar Álvarez de Sotomayor was her entry into the religious Order of the Adorers, a community in which she would remain for the rest of her life. This step meant not an abandonment, but a transformation of her artistic work, which came to be crossed by a mystical sensibility and a spiritual recollection that translated into a more intimate production.