Amalia Avia is one of the most representative practitioners of the group of Spanish realist artists who trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts of Madrid. While she engaged with differing aesthetics and techniques promulgated by the avant-gardes, she never relinquished its signs of identity and its way of turning everyday elements into the object of creation. Since their time together at the school the members of the group were to remain long-lasting friends: Carmen Laffón (1934), the López Hernández brothers, Isabel Quintanilla (1938-2017), Antonio López (1936) and María Moreno (1933-2020). Also at the school Avia met her future husband, Lucio Muñoz (1929-1998), whom she married in 1960.

Although she was an outstanding engraver, her medium of choice for most of her works was painting on board. That is the case of the pieces in the BBVA Collection, all of them made in the 1970s, a period in her painting marked by her interest for inhospitable streets, building facades, shops or corners in the outskirts of the city, where the main focus is buildings and their surrounding environs, while the human figure is relegated to a secondary level in those rare occasions when it does appear. These are all elements of the “chronicle of everyday life” that Avia wishes to recount through subdued, dark ochre and grey tones, exuding a sense of melancholy and stillness.

Time seems to be on hold in this magnificent work, where Avia indulges her liking for urban scenes featuring buildings and their environs yet purged of all human figures.

The train stopped at a siding, the leafless tree... everything conveys a sad, lonely feeling. Here the barrels are given particular relevance, almost as if they were a group of people standing patiently on the platform, waiting for life to eventually win out over the all-pervasive melancholy. Everything goes towards underscoring the feeling that, with the passing of time, all the objects represented have been forgotten about.