Vicente Gandía

1935 Valencia, Spain - 2009 Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

BiographyVicente Gandía was born in Valencia, Spain in 1935. He immigrated as a teen with his mother and sister to Mexico in 1951 to live with his uncle. The family settled in Mexico City, where the artist lived until moving later in life to Cuernavaca.

Shortly after his arrival in Mexico he enrolled in the architecture program of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México but dropped out two years later. He devoted himself to painting instead, becoming self-taught.

He had an art career that spanned over fifty years, remaining active in this work until his death.

His career has mostly been in painting but has also done various other types of works such as print making, sculpting, ceramics and jewelry design. He began by drawing interiors of buildings in the 1950s while still an architecture student. After leaving architecture, he worked on various projects until his big break in painting in 1968. Since then, his work with its simple iconography became popular internationally.

He had numerous individual shows at venues in Mexico and abroad such as the Columbia Museum of Art in 1968 and 1973, the Chastenet European Center, London in 1976, the Kimberley Gallery, Washington in 1987, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1988, Capella de l’Antic Hospital in Barcelona in 1990, Galerie Palette Roderhaus Wuppertal in Wuppertal, the Galerie du Palais de la Culture, Algiers in 1991, and the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid in 1993.

Although he worked in a number of techniques such as murals, graphic art and even some cinema, most of his work and his best work is oil on canvas, done in a principally figurative and naturalist style. He was a self-taught artist. His style was based on simple objects, eliminating excessive rhetoric in his work and the modulation of space.[5] He created landscapes, scenes of houses, greenhouses, patios, labyrinths, flowers, fruits and the homes he lived in over the years, with elements that seem to move. Notable examples of his work include Silla en jardín (1988) and El oscuro splendor (1994) .

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