JUAN BARJOLA

Juan Antonio Galea Barjola was born in a modest family of workers in the village of  Torre de Miguel Sesmero. On finishing his studies in the School Of Arts and Craftsmanship in Badajoz he continued his education in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid in 1943, alternating his classes with constant visits to the Museum of Prado and the Casón del Buen Retiro, which soon excited his admiration of Francisco de Goya’s canvases and which had a substantial impact on his art and his continual attention to the human being. In 1957 he staged the first individual exhibition in the Gallery Abril in Madrid and three years later he was awarded the scholarship of the Juan March Foundation which gave him a possibility to travel throughout France and Belgium and get in touch with neo-european expressionists.  In the following years he started to make exhibitions abroad, and success was achieved in the New York Fair and the Biennial in Venetia, Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Alexandria. In 1963 the consecration and the definite recognition of the public and critics followed, with an anthology in the General Direction of Fine Arts of Madrid, the Eugenio D’Ors medal and the National Prize for Drawing. In the period between 1968 and 1975 he combined the artistic output and teaching activity, as during this period he was a professor of Colour and Composition in the Royal Academy of San Fernando and also participated in the illustration of the texts of Rafael Alberti, José Hierro and Arturo Gamoneda. The main recognition came some years later, when in 1985 he was awarded the National Prize of the Arts.

Without title, around 1964

As expected, Barjola’s work underwent a profound evolution since the first rural paintings of his youth till the recognition of the maturity. In the fifties he tried to work in the field of abstract painting, influenced probably by the informalist current that shook up the Europe of that time, at least it is for sure that at the end of the decade he returned to the figuration style of well presented colour combination and chromatic sobriety that he will never give up. During the seventies he became famous for the paintings with the social motifs, but in the eighties and nineties it was converted into critical expressionism with the tendency towards the denunciation that was transferred to the use of colours in garish and contrasting mixtures.
Barjola offered more than a hundred of his canvases to the foundation of the Barjola Museum in Gijon, decision that was surely favoured by the Asturian roots of his wife Honesta Fernández, who was mother of his son, the architect José Antonio Galea.

Juan Barjola died in Madrid at the age of 85 on the 21st of December 2004.

Claudio Coello 6 28001 Madrid tel. (34) 91 435 0174 galeria@josedelamano.com