JOSÉ VELA ZANETTI

Originally from Burgos, he moves very soon to Leon where he starts his career as a painter that he will combine with the ceramics and the engraving. During the civil war he was a member of the republican band for which he edited a number of various magazines.   In 1936 he moves to Santo Domingo where alongside with other exiles he creates the National School of Fine Arts. From there starts his extensive artistic career exhibiting his works in Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States.

In 1954 Vela Zanetti gets one of the most important orders: to paint a wall of a big size for the building of the Organization of the United Nations in New York which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights. At the beginning of the sixties he returns to Spain and continues his work of a painter of walls.

One can easily notice the influence of the Mexican wall painting in his work. These enormous walls emerge in the land of peasants of Castilla with their own style of heavy dabs of vivid colours. The religious themes should also be emphasized in Vela Zanetti’s painting – especially the fragments of the Last Supper – carried out in order to decorate American and Spanish modest churches.

His work has been recognized in a number of occasions just like his appointment in the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando or the Honoris Causa by the University of Burgos.