'80. Painting and graphic work in Spain', a visual journey through 63 pieces by the 42 most relevant artists of a period of creative explosion that would set the benchmark throughout the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. This outstanding proposal is made possible thanks to the donation of the Collection of original graphic works that Emilio Pi and Helena Fernandino made to Pamplona City Council last July - of which 43 pieces are presented - and to the collaboration of Jaime Sordo, who has lent a set of 20 paintings from his Bragales collection . This is a travelling exhibition in two venues: the Sala de Armas de la Ciudadela in Pamplona, Navarre, and the Sala Mauro Murieras in Torrelavega, Cantabria.

80 Pintura y obra gráfica en España' (80 Painting and Graphic Work in Spain) offers a panoramic tour through the work of 42 key artists of this creative moment, from all over Spain and belonging to various generations, most of them born in the 1940s and 1950s, with the most veteran being the Catalans, now deceased, Tàpies and Rafòls-Casamada, born in 1923, and the youngest being the Galician Antón Patiño and the Mallorcan Miquel Barceló, born in 1957. All of them are exponents of the recent history of Spanish art, as evidenced by the presence among them of 18 national plastic arts prizes, an award established in 1980.

A good visual coexistence between the Pi-Fernandino Legacy and the 'Bragales Collection'
The exhibition proposes a very visual tour, a puzzle of images made up of the pieces arranged for this stage of the Sala de Armas of the Citadel: the paintings of the Los Bragales Collection and the original graphic works of the Pi-Fernandino Legacy donated to the Contemporary Art Collection of the Pamplona City Council. Their coexistence allows to know and to establish divergences and connections between these two creative languages and their own material and technical characteristics, from the large formats of oils, acrylics and other mixed techniques on canvas to the Prints on paper, fruit of the alchemy of burins, acids, lithographic stones, silkscreens, inks and resins printed under the printer's press.
The exhibition makes a retrospective of the plastic art of the 80s in Spain, a period that has been called in different current reviews as the years of "enthusiasm", propitiated by a political context of democratic eagerness, of opening to the world, ratified with the signing, in 1985, of the Treaty of Accession to the European Union and, above all, by a context of economic euphoria that began in this decade of the 80s and that will suffer its 'crack' with the crisis of 2008. All these circumstances had a multiplying effect in the artistic field, giving rise to an unusual development that favored the growth of a contemporary art market in Spain, the emergence of a 'cultural industry', which was manifested in all its agents, from artists to galleries, along with a greater appreciation and knowledge on the part of the public towards the most current artistic manifestations.

The first opportunity to enjoy the collection donated in June to the City Council
The Pi Fernandino collection, a benchmark in national and international contemporary art collecting, donated 156 works to the Pamplona City Council last June, which have since become part of the Consistory's Contemporary Art Collection. This is a private collection made up of works acquired since the 1990s by the Madrid-based business couple from Pamplona, Emilio Pi and Helena Fernandino, who have become a reference in national and international private collecting. Their video art collection, partly donated to the Museo Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, was distinguished in 2010 with the award ARCO for the best Spanish collection.
As the municipal reports state, the collection has, among its areas of specialization, an important collection of graphic works by the most outstanding artists of the Spanish scene in the 1990s, as well as a series of small-format special editions by very significant authors of this same context. These creations cover the period between 1983 and 2007, although most of them belong to the 1990s. That decade marked the consecration of Spanish graphic art on the international scene, both for the renown obtained by its creators and for the interest aroused in its commercialization.