Who is Menchu Gal?
Carmen Gal Orendain (1919 - 2008), better known as Menchu Gal, was a Spanish painter from the Basque Country, who became known for her works, landscapes and portraits, full of vivid colors. In 1959, she became the first woman to receive Spain's National Painting Prize. Menchu Gal was essential for the renewal of post-war Spanish painting and, valued and recognized, since his youth, in the difficult world of painting.
Menchu Gal's artistic path
Carmen Gal Orendain was born into a family with possibilities and cult, having been encouraged to paint from a young age. At the age of seven, she began taking drawing classes with the painter Gaspar Montes Iturrioz (1901–1998) and at the age of 13 she was selected for the IX Exhibition of New Guipuzcoan Artists, which took place at the Casino del Kursaal in the Basque city of San Sebastián. In 1932, aged just 15, he went to Paris and enrolled in the academy of the cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant. After spending a year in the Parisian environment, in which she had the opportunity to visit many exhibitions of Impressionist and Fauvist masters, Menchu Gal became deeply interested in the work of Henri Matisse.
In 1934 he arrived in Madrid and entered the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where Aurelio Arteta and Daniel Vázquez Díaz taught. She also received private lessons from Marisa Roësset Velasco and lived in the Residence for Girls run by educator and feminist María de Maeztu. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Menchu Gal returned to France with his family. In 1943, she returned to Madrid where Gutiérrez Solana put her in contact with Benjamín Palencia, Francisco San José, Rafael Zabaleta and Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja, a circle of landscape artists whose paintings were dominated by bright colors and lights. In the last phase of his life, he lived in the Basque Country and supported the new generations of Basque painters. He died in San Sebastián on March 12, 2008 at the age of 89. Two years later, in January 2010, the Menchu Gal Exhibition Hall was opened in Irún, where works acquired in 2007 were exhibited.
The landscape in the work of Menchu Gal
From the 1960s onwards, the landscape became the sole focus of his practice, proving to be the ideal terrain for his formal experimentation. From that moment on, the artist gave less importance to other genres that she cultivated throughout her career, such as still life and portraiture. For his landscapes, Menchu Gal used mainly oil paints, but also watercolors and prints. The 1970s saw the moment of artistic recognition, when his painting moved towards greater gestures and abstraction.
Exhibitions and retrospectives
During his 77 years as an artist, Menchu Gal participated in 70 solo exhibitions and 232 group exhibitions. In 1942, he had his first solo exhibition in San Sebastián and in 1950 he had a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Madrid. The landscapes of the Castilian plateau became the hallmark of his work, but Menchu Gal also produced portraits and still lifes, all in vivid color. Of his numerous exhibitions, the following stand out: Landscape in contemporary Spanish painting, presented by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon (1971); The woman in Spanish art, at the Conde-Duque cultural center, and The School of Vallecas and a new look at the landscape, both in 1990. In 1940, 1950 and 1956, she was chosen to represent Spain at the Venice Biennale. In 1986, the Museum of San Telmo, in the Basque Country, organized its first anthological exhibition. His works are on display in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. In 2019, his work was part of the group exhibition Drajantas, Pioneers of Illustration at the ABC Drawing and Illustration Museum in Madrid.
