Néstor Martín- Fernández de la Torre

NÉSTOR MARTÍN-FERNÁNDEZ DE LA TORRE (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1887 - 1938).
Untitled.
Gouache on paper.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 45 x 58 cm; 48 x 61,5 cm (frame).
Known simply as Nestor, he was a painter framed within the European symbolism and modernism, author of a work unanimously considered as key to understand these artistic movements. He began to draw as a child, and in 1899 his first teacher was the Catalan landscape painter Eliseo Meifrén, by whose hand he painted his first picture. When he was fifteen he moved to Madrid, where he became a disciple of Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes. In 1904 he began a trip around Europe that would take him to Paris, Brussels, Ghent, Bruges and London. However, it was his years in Paris that ended up shaping his personal language, giving him a great decorative scope, since he carried out several projects of ornamentation of public buildings and scenery and figurine design. On his return to Spain he held his first exhibition in 1908, at the Círculo Ecuestre in Barcelona, and the following year he exhibited at the prestigious Sala Parés in the same city. A few years later he exhibited in another of the key halls of modernism, the Faianç Català (1911). He then returned to London and there he executed a series of etchings that won him first prize at the London Municipal School. In the following years he continued to show his work in exhibitions in Paris and Madrid. Before the end of the decade he carried out his first major scenographic project, the creation of sets and costumes for Manuel de Falla's "El amor brujo", premiered in Madrid in 1915. In 1928 he moved his studio to Paris, from where he sent his paintings to various exhibitions both in Europe and America, the first of them in Buenos Aires in 1918, even before settling in the French capital. In 1924 he presented the first part of his vital work, the series "Poema del Atlántico", in the Palacio de la Biblioteca and in the Municipal Museum of Madrid. That same year he also exhibited in Venice. After a trip to Africa, Nestor finally returned to the Canary Islands in the 1930s, where he spent the last part of his life. His work is currently kept in the Nestor Museum in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, among other collections.