Mercedes Ruibal

MERCEDES RUIBAL (Xeve, Pontevedra, 1928 - 2003).
"Maternity", 1990.
Mixed media on canvas.
Signed and dated in the left margin.
Measurements: 35 x 27 cm; 47 x 39 cm (frame).
Born into a family of artists in which her mother worked in a naïf style, both her brother -the playwright José Ruibal from Compostela- and her sister and father were also linked to the world of the arts. In fact, Mercedes Ruibal married the painter -and playwright- Agustín Pérez Bellas. A disciple of the Galician painter Laxeiro, with whom she trained during her time in Buenos Aires, Ruibal's painting is framed within the so-called "new figuration", a movement of the sixties that broke with the informalism of the previous period and proposed a figurative-based painting with which it was more suitable to convey political and social messages. It was in Buenos Aires where she held her first exhibition, and the following year she returned to her native Galicia and later moved to Madrid, where she continued her training, fascinated by the atmosphere that prevailed in post-war Madrid at the time. Ruibal's style is characterized by its archaic and naive primitivism, with forms tending to expressionism, which are rooted in the most dreamlike and surrealistic thoughts of the work of her husband Pérez Bellas. At first Ruibal worked on children's themes and maternity, however, her style evolved towards more complex compositions in which she included everything from Vietnam and Bosnian war wounded, to bullfighting and characters from Classical Greece. Ruibal's fame led him to exhibit not only within the Galician and Madrid panorama, but also beyond national borders, exhibiting in Florence and Rome, among many other European cities.