Mario Granell

MARIO GRANELL (A Coruña, 1915-Vigo 1991).
"Seated character", 1957.
Ink on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 31 x 20 cm; 42 x 31 cm (frame).
Granell spent his childhood in Santiago, where he began his painting studies with the muralist Camilo Díaz Baliño, making his first individual exhibitions at the age of fourteen, in Santiago and Pontevedra. In 1929 he received his first painting award in a group exhibition in Vilagarcía, where the jury included Carlos Maside and Fermín Bouza-Brey. His family's move to Madrid in 1930, in the midst of the Second Republic, coincided with the rebirth of Spanish art. His vocation grew thanks to the gatherings of the members of the Generation of '27 and to sharing exhibitions with some of them, such as Rafael Alberti. He was also influenced by the access to magazines such as the French Minotaure, through Cándido Fernández Mazas, from Orense. The outbreak of the Civil War surprised Mario Granell in Vilagarcía, where he hid for a few days. After trying to escape in a boat from Bens beach, he was court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment. In prison he illustrated children's books such as Emar, Marsa y Sorom and Olguita. Finally, in 1942 he was released from prison and, once free, he directed his career towards muralism, decoration, poster design and scenography. In 1957 he left for Venezuela, where he continued with his artistic work, holding numerous exhibitions and winning several awards. For some time he was the exclusive painter of the Aurora Gallery in Caracas. Mario Granell has been a painter and poet. Inscribed, like his brother Eugenio, in the surrealist sphere and the volume, but the representativeness and projection of his plastic work have been notably smaller. He is part of the history of the Galician intellectuality of the 20th century from a broad perspective linked to creativity: he has written, painted and drawn from a position linked to nationalism. He stood out especially in the field of drawing and graphic design. For some critics he is an artist framed in surrealism, for others his work is unclassifiable, because of his very personal style, loaded with a great imaginative force, which even came to be described as "granellismo".