Mario Granell

MARIO GRANELL (A Coruña, 1915-Vigo 1991).
"Crucifixion", 1974.
Oil on panel.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 90 x 30 cm; 107 x 47,5 cm (frame).
Granell spent his childhood in Santiago, where he began his painting studies with the muralist Camilo Díaz Baliño, holding his first individual exhibitions at the age of fourteen, in Santiago and Pontevedra. In 1929 he received his first painting prize at a group exhibition in Vilagarcía, where the jury included Carlos Maside and Fermín Bouza-Brey. His family's move to Madrid in 1930, at the height 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 access to magazines such as the French Minotaure, through the Orihensian Cándido Fernández Mazas. 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-martialled 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 turned his attention to mural painting, decoration, poster design and scenography. In 1957 he left for Venezuela, where he continued his artistic work, holding numerous exhibitions and winning several prizes. For some time he was the exclusive painter of the Aurora Gallery in Caracas. Mario Granell has been a painter and a poet. Like his brother Eugenio, he was part of the surrealist sphere and volume, but the representativeness and projection of his plastic work has been considerably less. He is part of the history of Galician intellectuality in the 20th century from a broad viewpoint linked to creativity: he wrote, painted and drew from a position linked to nationalism. He stood out above all in the field of drawing and graphic design. For some critics he is a surrealist artist, for others his work is unclassifiable, due to his highly personal style, charged with great imaginative force, which has even been described as "Granellism".