Alex Alemany

ALEX ALEMANY (Gandía, Valencia, 1943–2021).
“Portrait.”
Oil on panel.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 55 x 45 cm, 70 x 60 cm (frame).
Alex Alemany began his artistic training in 1960, the year he enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts in Valencia. There, he completed the preparatory studies for the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, where he was admitted the following year. At San Carlos, he studied under Francisco Lozano, Enrique Ginesta, Genaro Lahuerta, Felipe M. Garín, and others. Four years later, in 1965, he traveled to Paris with the aim of furthering his training alongside contemporary artists. In 1966, he repeated this experience, this time extending his stay in France. In 1968, he lived for a time in London, where he studied the masters at the National Portrait Gallery. Over the next two years, until 1970, he traveled and experimented with various artistic movements, focusing on expressionist abstraction. During this period of his youth, Alemany explored many avant-garde movements, immersing himself in the prevailing artistic currents, until he finally found his own style, one that was increasingly in harmony with his poetic sensibility. In 1975, he painted his first works marking a return to figurative art, accurately anticipating the movement embraced and followed by other international artists under the name “Magical Realism.” Between 1975 and 1978, he settled in Madrid, where he alternated between social portraits and works with surrealist themes. Alex Alemany’s realism—and in some cases, hyperrealism—gradually evolved into an unmistakable personal style, the result of personal introspection, thus progressively distancing itself from the coldness of other realist approaches indebted to photography, such as American realism. Alemany’s work serves as a bridge between the literary and the pictorial, rich in metaphors and subconscious imagery. Within his body of work, which reveals his predilection for the human figure, there is a large number of portraits—a genre he approaches by moving away from academic conventions. He has painted Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain, various members of the Royal Family, university rectors, academics, presidents of provincial councils, mayors, etc., as well as countless private individuals. In addition, he served as president of the Valencia Fine Arts Circle from 1993 to 2004, and in 1998 he was named an elected member of the Royal Academy of Valencian Culture. He has exhibited his work in Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Venezuela, Mexico, and Germany, and his works are currently held in private collections and museums.