Museo Carmen Thyssen

Some thirty works by more than twenty artists make up this diverse and colourful mosaic of the figurative painting that became a symbol of the new modernity ushered in by Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1980s.

For the main players in this productive period for Spanish contemporary art, it was a decade that vindicated painting: its validity as a means of reinvigorating artistic exploration and its ability to produce original creations that reflected a time of newfound freedoms. A time for taking real pleasure in painting.

Liberated and multicoloured, hedonistic and apolitical in its themes, steeped in expressiveness and captured on large canvases, a new figurative art flourished in the hands of young artists. Some (such as Gordillo, Arroyo and the Schizos of the Madrid figurative movement: Franco, Alcolea, Pérez Villalta, Cobo, Quejido, Molero) had been active since the 1960s and the 1970s; others (García Sevilla, Barceló, Patiño, Lamas, Gadea, Ugalde) joined the pluralistic scene brimming with creativity in the 1980s.

Despite their diverse backgrounds (many were from Andalusia), they all shared the same environment – with Madrid and its vibrant cultural scene, the Movida, as the geographical epicentre – and a generational aim to create a new kind of painting, each from their own approach, in a period of optimism and enthusiasm that was a far cry from the preceding dictatorship.

Surveying the multifarious scene of the time, where figurative art coexisted alongside an abstract art that had also moved on from the Art Informel of the 1950s and 1960s and prevailed over conceptual art, this exhibition examines the pre-eminence of a rebellious and provocative type of painting without rules which championed the playful and frivolous side and the sheer pleasure of painting and looking. It was a liberated painting that artists, critics, galleries and institutions presented as a reflection of the collective liberation of 1980s Spain.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta. Escena. Personajes a la salida de un concierto de rock, 1979
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
© Guillermo Pérez Villalta, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025

Carlos Alcolea. Los borrachos, 1978-1979
Colección Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres
© Carlos Alcolea, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025

Miquel Barceló. Mapa de carne, 1982
Colección de Arte Contemporáneo Fundación “la Caixa”
© Miquel Barceló, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025

Patricia Gadea. Viaje al Monte Negro, 1984
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
© Patricia Gadea, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025