TEHRAN-Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art will hold the second session from the series “One Work, One Session,” on July 1, in which a painting by the Spanish artist Antonio Saura will be examined.

Lecturer, author, and researcher Erfan Nazar and lecturer Davood Baniardalan will speak at the session, Mehr reported.

Antonio Saura (1930–1998) was an artist and writer, one of the major post-war painters to emerge in Spain in the fifties whose work has marked several generations of artists and whose critical voice is often remembered.

He began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid while suffering from tuberculosis, having already been confined to his bed for five years. In his beginnings, he created numerous drawings and paintings with a dreamlike surrealist character that most often represented imaginary landscapes, employing a flat smooth treatment that offers a rich palette of colors. He claimed Hans Arp and Yves Tanguy as his artistic influences.

He stayed in Paris in 1952 and in 1954–1955 during which he met Benjamin Péret and associated with the Surrealists, although he soon parted with the group, joining instead the company of his friend the painter Simon Hantaï. Using the technique of scraping, he adopted a gestural style and created an abstract type of painting, still very colorful with an organic, aleatory design.

The first appearances in his work of forms that would soon become archetypes of the female body or the human figure occurred in the mid-1950s. Starting in 1956, Saura tackled the register of what would prove to be his greatest works: women, self-portraits, shrouds, and crucifixions, which he painted on both canvas and paper. In 1957 in Madrid, he founded the El Paso Group and served as its director until it broke up in 1960. During this period Saura met Michel Tapié.

During the 1950s, he had his first solo exhibition at the Rodolphe Stadler Gallery in Paris, where he regularly exhibited throughout his life. Stadler introduced him to Otto van de Loo in Munich and Pierre Matisse in New York City, both of whom exhibited his work and represented him, and eventually his paintings were collected by major museums.

Limiting his palette to blacks, grays, and browns, Saura asserted a personal style that was independent of the movements and trends of his generation. His work followed in the tradition of Velasquez and Goya. Starting in 1959, he began creating a prolific body of works in print, illustrating numerous books including Cervantes's Don Quijote, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nöstlinger's adaptation of Pinocchio, Kafka’s Tagebücher, Quevedo’s Three Visions, and many others.

In 1960, Saura began creating sculptures made of welded metal elements that represented human figures, characters, and crucifixions. In 1967, he settled permanently in Paris and joined the opposition to Francoist Spain. In France, he participated in numerous debates and controversies in the fields of politics, aesthetics, and artistic creation. He also broadened his thematic and pictorial register. 

In 1971, he temporarily abandoned painting on canvas to devote himself to writing, drawing, and painting on paper. In 1977, Rolf Lauter and Antonio Saura met for the first time in the Rodolphe Stadler Gallery in Paris and started a dialogue and a long-standing friendship. In 1979, the collaboration gave rise to the first major retrospective at the Galerie de Margarete Lauter Mannheim with more than 50 images and drawings, followed by many other presentations. 

In 1977, Saura began publishing his writings, and he created several stage designs for the theater, ballet, and opera, thanks to the collaboration with his brother, the film director Carlos Saura. From 1983 to his death in 1998, he revisited all of his themes and figures.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art aims to critically review valuable artwork from its collection every Monday. These artworks have been less frequently exhibited in recent decades. 

The session is held at 3 p.m. at the conference hall of the TMoCA, which is located next to Laleh Park, on North Kargar St. Admission is free for the public.

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