Menchu Gal

Menchu Gal - Sandbanks in Fuenterrabía

Artist Biography:

Menchu Gal (Irun 1919-San Sebastian 2008) initially trained in Irun with Gaspar Montes Iturrioz. She won the Prize in the Contest of New Artists of Guipuzcoa in 1932 and before she was fifteen years old she moved to Paris, where she received classes from the master of cubism Amédée Ozenfant. There he discovered Matisse and Fauvism.
In the early forties he returned to the capital of Spain where he was part of the so-called Madrid School. He attended classes at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. There she learned from masters such as Arteta and Vázquez Díaz, but the Civil War of 1936 forced her to take refuge again in France. Menchu Gal has been an outstanding architect of the renewal of Spanish post-war painting and, valued and recognized in the difficult world of painting since her youth, in 1959 she became the first woman to be awarded the National Painting Prize.
The landscapes of La Mancha and her native region were since then her hallmark and she consolidated her position as one of the great artists of the post-war period. Her production also included portraits and still lifes with which she starred in many exhibitions in museums and art centers around the world: Gulbenkian Foundation in 1971, Conde Duque Cultural Center in 1990 and Cultural Center of the Villa de Madrid. She also participated in the Venice Biennale on three occasions.
Menchu Gal was ahead of her time. The Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa awarded her, in 2005, the Gold Medal of Gipuzkoa, the most important distinction granted by the Provincial Government. Thus, the painter from Irún became the first woman in the history of this medal. On that occasion, the deputy general Joxe Juan Gonzalez de Txabarri, highlighted her free spirit, "most of the time heterodox. Independent, precocious traveler, intellectually restless, Menchu Gal has been a woman ahead of her time; linked to the most important painters, artists and avant-garde of the twentieth century.