The Guillermo de Osma Gallery opens the season with the exhibition “Biomorphism. 1920-1950 ”, where 60 works will be exhibited, including oil paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures. It is the first time that an exhibition is organized with the ambition to analyze and show this artistic phenomenon.
The exhibition has been conceived by Guitemie Maldonado for the Le Minotaure and Alain le Gaillard galleries in Paris. Historian and professor at the University of Paris, Maldonado is the author of the book “Le Cercle et l’amibe. Le biomorphisme dans l’art des années 1930 ”(Paris, 2006). The Madrid show takes up that idea, incorporating many new features, among which the contribution of Spanish art stands out.
Biomorphism is characterized by the recurrent use of a type of simple and irregular plastic forms that evoke the organic or biological world: neurons, amoebas, cells, constellations ... They are generally curvilinear and give rise to an impression of movement, evolution or transformation. The forms are familiar as well as intriguing, located in the border area between figuration and abstraction.
It is a fairly unknown current but very present in the art of international avant-garde. It never existed as an artistic movement as such; It was rather a plastic current that marked a large group of artists of different kinds and backgrounds that evolved from their previous positions between 1920 and 1950 and produced works with great aesthetic coincidences, which make us consider this production as a novel and individualized phenomenon of great interest.
This exhibition will consist of works by artists of Cubist origin (Picasso, Fernand Lèger and Georges Valmier), Dadaist (Hans Arp and Francis Picabia), linked to the Bauhaus, (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Vassily Kandisnky), surrealists (Hans Bellmer , Joan Miró, Óscar Domínguez, Victor Brauner, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, Remedios Varo), constructivists (Torres-García, Luis Castellanos, Auguste Herbin, Jean Helion, Cesar Domela, Leon Tutunjian, Luis Fernández, Étienne Béothy, Robert Michel and Ella Bergmann-Michel) and a large group of more independent creators (Le Corbusier, Julio González, Alfred Reth, Serge Charchoune, Willi Baumeister, Germán Cueto). The exhibition is completed with a set of works by Spanish artists (Palencia, Moreno Villa, Ángel Ferrant, Maruja Mallo, Lekuona, Gabriel Celaya, Alfonso Olivares, Togores, Alemany), many of them related to the Vallecas School, their connection telluric and prehistoric and Iberian art. Finally, works by younger artists will be exhibited (Antonio Saura and Mathias Goeritz - founder of the Altamira School -), which confirm that this current was an important source of inspiration for future generations, becoming fundamental for the birth of the abstract expressionism and informalism.