20th-21st Century Spanish

Julián Grau Santos is one of the most outstanding figurative painters and illustrators in Spanish art, both within his own generation and among the art practitioners of the last quarter of the 20^th century.

Encouraged by his parents, the painters Emili Grau Sala (1911-1975) and Ángeles Santos (1911- 2013), he was a precocious artist. In 1954 his family moved to Barcelona, where he trained at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts.

After the Civil War, Grau Santos moved to Paris, where he saw in the flesh for the first time the works of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, particularly of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891), Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) y Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). In 1978 he returned to Spain and settled in Madrid. Grau Santos works not only with painting, but also as a sculptor—a practice he started in 1974—and as an illustrator and drawing artist, regularly contributing to a number of magazines such as, among others, ABC Cultural and the El Cultural supplement of the El Mundo daily newspaper.

Although as a painter he cannot be pigeonholed in any particular group, he took an active part in the renewal of the figurative tradition. In his still lifes, landscapes and interiors with figures, Grau Santos mostly engages with a study of the alterations provoke in forms and colours by the variations of light, with an ongoing interest in capturing the liveliness of the everyday. He practices a brand of painting that discards all artificiality, rendered with a long and colour-laden brushstroke defining contours that have been attenuated with the passing of the years.

His first solo show was organised at Sala Libros in Zaragoza in 1957. Since then, his work has been included in countless exhibitions worldwide, as well as in many international art fairs. He is a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts since 1980.