20th-21st Century Spanish

Menchu Gal started taking art classes in her hometown at a very early age under Gaspar Montes Iturrioz (1901-1998), who advised her family to send her to Paris to further her education. Following his advice, she moved there in 1932 and took drawing classes at Académie Ozenfant. On returning to Spain, she attended the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid where she had Aurelio Arteta (1879-1940) and Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969) among her teachers.

In 1938 she returned to the French capital to spend some time there. All these various sojourns in Paris (where she would return on several occasions) allowed her to witness first-hand the works of avant-garde movements, particularly and , whose compositional methods and palette would have a lasting influence on Gal’s work.

Notwithstanding the political, economic and artistic hardships of post-war Spain, her career took off in the following decades. The 1940s started with her participation in the Venice Biennale (where she would return again in 1950 and 1956) and saw her earliest solo exhibitions. She settled definitively in Madrid, where José Gutiérrez Solana (1886-1945) introduced her to other young and mid-career artists interested in the representation of the landscape of Castile, joining them in a group show at Galería Clan in 1945. She particularly admired the work of Benjamín Palencia (1894-1980), who exerted a critical influence on Gal, freeing her from her previous style of muted tones and rigid lines and giving rise to a more expressionistic and matter-based period.

Throughout the 1950s the artist was close to the , and exhibited regularly with its members between 1951 and 1962. She shared with them a particular way of treating nature and an interest in creating art removed from academic languages. Given Spain’s isolation at the time, she found her most immediate references in the early-twentieth century French avant-gardes which reached her mostly through Palencia and Vázquez Díaz.

In 1959 Menchu Gal became the first woman to obtain the First Medal at Spain’s National Painting Competition. By then, the artist was already enjoying artistic and economic success—exhibiting profusely and participating frequently in solo and group shows throughout Spain.

As from the 1960s, landscape became the sole focus of her practice, proving the ideal ground for her formal experimentation. From then on the artist lent lesser importance to other genres which she had cultivated throughout her preceding career, like still life and portraiture. For her landscapes, Gal mostly used oil paints, but also watercolours and prints.

The 1970s, when her painting moved towards greater gesturality and abstraction, was the time of her definitive recognition. The Museo San Telmo in San Sebastian held her first survey show in 1986, and Sala Garibay (Obra Social Kutxa), also in San Sebastian, hosted a retrospective of her work in 1992, which toured the following year to Museo de Navarra. In 2005 she was awarded Guipuzcoa’s Gold Medal.

In 2010, two years after her demise, the town of Irun opened the Menchu Gal exhibition hall, dedicated to promoting the work of Gal and other local artists. Major surveys followed, like those held at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (2012), Bizkaia Aretoa (2012) and Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea (2019).