20th-21st Century Spanish

Agustín Ibarrola is an influential multidisciplinary Basque artist from the second avant-garde, renowned for his paintings, engravings, sculptures and projects. He defines himself as a creator and painter of public spaces who applies his brushwork to canvases, rocks and tree barks in order to engage in a relationship with the stars, life and humans.

Virtually self-taught, throughout his career Ibarrola incorporated a variety of expressions on both a formal and thematic level. At the early age of eleven, when he started to work on a farm, he spent his breaks drawing on the rocks with a piece of brick. At the age of fourteen, now working in an industrial shoemakers, he painted on canvases he created with scraps of sandpaper that his mother helped him to clean and stretch. During that period, he became particularly interested in the painting of Aurelio Arteta (1879-1940), visiting and making countless sketches of the same landscapes that Arteta had painted. Several important figures from the Basque cultural scene helped to organise his first exhibition when he was only seventeen years of age while still a student at the School of Arts and Crafts of Bilbao. They were struck by his passion for painting and managed to get a scholarship for him to travel to Madrid and learn under Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969), whose atelier was a true hub for the arts at the time and where the young Ibarrola had a chance to experiment with new languages in the company of Rafael Canogar (1935), Francisco Moreno Galván (1923-1981) and Jesús Olasagasti (1907-1955).

In 1956 Ibarrola travelled to Paris for the first time. His discovery of the art of the fin-de-siècle and the avant-gardes triggered in him a sense of expressive freedom and a connection with international art movements. In his second sojourn in the French capital, one year later, he met a number of Spanish artists who, like him, were struggling to make a living there. Together they founded the group. The group disbanded in 1962, around the same time as Ibarrola was arrested. In the following three years he continued painting in prison. His wife, Mari Luz Bellido managed to exhibit his works in towns and cities in northern Spain and any sales made went towards helping to support the family. The artist’s production in the 1970s was marked by his peaceful defence of the freedom of creation and expression through works that acknowledged his personal experience and commented on the industrial society in which he had grown up.

It was in 1982 when Ibarrola began his most emblematic work, The Oma Forest, embarking on a free exploration of the rural Basque Country near the home where he lived. There he observed the countless nuances of the shadows cast by the trees and reflected on the physical alteration of landscape and perception, painting shapes and figures directly on the tree trunks. The resulting work, which, from the very beginning, aroused the interest of many visitors and government institutions, opened up new possibilities for intervening in other spaces, including The Forest of Totems (1996), Wave to the Rhythm of Txalaparta (1986/87) or The Cubes of Memory (2001-2006). With his public sculptures and Ibarrola clearly advocates the social purpose and accessibility of art.

Agustín Ibarrola exhibited at important events such as the 1972 Pamplona Art Encounters or the Venice Biennale in 1976. He was awarded the Círculo de Bellas Artes Gold Medal in 2005 for his life’s work. He has had exhibitions at Centro Conde Duque and Palacio de Cristal in Madrid (1987) and Itsasmuseum, Bilbao (2021), among others. More recently, at the ARCOMadrid art fair in 2021, Galería José de la Mano presented a work inspired by Picasso’s Guernica which Ibarrola had created in 1977 as part of a campaign to bring Guernica to the town of the same name which had inspired it. Ibarrola’s work was purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao.

As a member of , Ibarrola received the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1993, the same year as the Reina Sofía Museum organised an exhibition of the work by that art collective.