Café comercial, 2011

Juan Alcalde  

Juan Alcalde was a Spanish painter and printmaker whose work is marked by solitude, visual poetry and a melancholic Expressionism. From a young age he studied art in Madrid, at the School of Arts and Crafts and the prestigious San Fernando Academy, but the Spanish Civil War cut his training short. He then lived a long exile that took him to France and Venezuela, where he consolidated his artistic career. In Paris he was associated with the School of Spanish Painters, although his painting followed a personal, expressionist path, with solitary urban scenes, introspective figures and still lifes he called "cacharros" (pots), always radiating mystery and silence in a palette dominated by ochres, blues, greys and nuanced whites. He held his first exhibition in 1940 and over the following decades exhibited in Caracas, Puerto Rico, Madrid, Paris, Bilbao and London, in solo and group shows that expanded his international recognition. His work is distinguished by simplified forms, soft contours and schematic compositions that convey an introspective sensitivity, and critics have always stressed its lyrical, essential character, often calling it "poetic and bare". In 2016, aged over 95, he received the Gold Medal of Honour of the Spanish Association of Painters and Sculptors. He returned permanently to Madrid in the 1980s and kept a moving artistic coherence throughout his life.