20th Century Spanish

The son of a wealthy landowner, in 1927 Óscar Domínguez moved to Paris for family business, and he settled there for good. He took up painting as a hobby until 1931, when his father died and he decided to turn to painting fulltime as a profession.

He entered into contact with the Surrealist movement, and in 1934 joined André Breton’s group, to which his great contribution was the automatist technique of de calcomania.The works dating from those years owe much to the painting of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and to the landscape of the Canary Islands, to which he would remain attached for years. Óscar Domínguez is widely considered one of the greatest exponents of Spanish Surrealism.

Political issues led to his expulsion from the group in 1945, when he began a period influenced by the practices of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). His friendship with the latter encouraged him to engage with , to which he added a surrealistic iconography. In the late 1940s Domínguez shook off the bonds of previous aesthetic chains and discovered his own personal style, much more schematic, compositionally more classicist and with a far more austere palette. From the mid 1950s onwards figurative elements lost ground to abstraction, although he ended up returning to automatism.

The acromegaly he suffered from eventually led to insanity in his later years and Domínguez finally killed himself on New Year’s Eve of 1957. His last remains rest in the pantheon of the Noailles in Montparnasse cemetery.