Agustín Ibarrola

(Biscay, Basauri, 1930 2023)

Untitled

ca. 1970

Oil on canvas

130 x 98 cm

Inv. no. P01546

BBVA Collection Spain



As a practically self-taught artist, since a very young age Agustín Ibarrola built a language of his own containing many references to the Basque Country (just like Aurelio Arteta, 1879-1940, and Daniel Vázquez Díaz, 1882-1969) and to his own personal circumstances. The son of workers, and indeed he always regarded himself as one, Ibarrola channelled his pacifist struggle for freedom of expression through a highly recognisable symbolism.

In the 1960s many works by Ibarrola achieved widespread popularity thanks to engravings printed by the Estampa Popular collective. Those images, printed with linocut and woodcut, techniques that produce hard, thick lines with little detail, could have exerted an influence on his approach to painting. As a founding member of
, in later years Ibarrola maintained the group’s intense colouring and geometric gesturality.

This untitled work ought to be ascribed to the painterly language Ibarrola practiced in the 1970s, often depicting boats, workers, hoists and chimneys with sketchy geometric brushwork. His compositions from this period show a personal vision of the Basque Country through representations of rural settings—with particular attention to caseríos, the typical Basque farmhouses—and industrial views. This work belongs to a highly recurrent subject matter, made up of images of the estuary and the sea. Precisely in 2021, Itsasmuseum Bilbao presented Ibarrola en la ría, agua, hierro, fuego y aire (Ibarrola in the Estuary, Water, Iron, Fire and Air), an exhibition dedicated to this genre. The various groups of parallel black lines so frequent in Ibarrola’s production are used here to depict the waves of the sea, but could also be taken as oars, thus suggesting the strength of human work at sea. The sailors on board are not recognisable individuals and their bodies are seen as a vague faceless group sticking out over the gunwale on the starboard side. The schematised elements in the composition, the austere colouring and the hard black lines clearly evince an art defending the collective identity of workers’ labour.

Yet, notwithstanding the political discourse of his oeuvre, Ibarrola never sacrifices the quality of his painting for the sake of ideology. The large format of this work, in which the red figure of the boat seen from a low angle seems to make headway at sea, manages to create a majestic image that speaks of its maker’s own sense of belonging. In the book Ibarrola ¿un pintor maldito? (1978), by Javier Angulo, the artist said: "as art is, in itself, a political instrument, what needed to be done was to endow it with profound content, to be aware that art is always a translation of thoughts, ideologies and individual and collective experiences, that it is grounded in the constants of a culture, in certain historical moments and in a specific time in the history of each people.”