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Amable ARIAS (1927–1984) Repeticion sobre violeta sucio, 197…
See original version (French)
22
-
Amable ARIAS (1927–1984) Repeticion sobre violeta sucio, 197…
See original version (French)
Estimate €3,000 - €5,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Amable ARIAS (1927–1984)
Repeticion sobre violeta sucio, 1973
Oil and collage on canvas, signed and dated lower right.
73 x 60 cm
Provenance: Artist’s collection, by bequest.
Exhibitions:
- Caja de Ahorro de Vizcaya, Bilbao, July–August 1989.
- Salas Municipales de Cultura, Durango, 1 September – 1 October 1989.
- Galeria Dieciséis, San Sebastián, April–May 1993.
Bibliography:
- M.d.C. ALONSO-PIMENTEL, Amable Arias, San Sebastián, University of Deusto – San Sebastián, 1997, no. 206.
A rebellious and self-taught artist, Amable Arias followed a highly distinctive artistic path in which the abstraction of the 1960s gave way to dreamlike figures poetically accompanied by colour.
Amable Arias was not originally Basque, but moved there with his family in 1942. Growing up in a deeply Catholic environment and suffering abuse at the hands of his father, he received no intellectual education as a child, let alone any artistic training. Out of this aversion to his father, he dropped his surname and went by the name Amable alone. At the age of nine, he was the victim of a serious accident that left him lame, and his life seemed destined to be a struggle. Yet none of this is apparent in his work.
Precise in his abstract compositions of the 1960s, Amable’s economy of means often serves as the resonant framework for deeply expressive works whose vibrancy resembles a system of musical composition (lot 18). From 1966 to 1967, he thus produced his ‘paintings of the atom’ or ‘paintings of the drop’ (lots 19 and 20).
He exhibited at the Neblí Gallery in Madrid in 1964, in 1965 at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, which featured him in issue 150 of its magazine *Derrière le Miroir* (March–April), and in 1967 at the Barandiarán Gallery in San Sebastián.
Close to an Internationalism opposed to Francoism, he was above all particularly independent and rejected any categorisation or group theory. As the founder of the Gaur Group, he thus embodied the pluralism and freedom of this self-proclaimed avant-garde.
From the 1970s onwards, returning to a form of figuration, Amable populated these works with small, dreamlike and poetic figures that make up his unique universe.
In this respect, ‘Sobre II’ (lot 22) is a particularly interesting work created in two stages. Begun in 1975 and resumed in 1978, this canvas is structured around the elements of a letter addressed to his mother, imbued with the poetic and sensitive sentiments of a son, which intertwine with a script transcribed from the radio broadcast he was listening to whilst creating the work, celebrating the death of Franco. Amable’s work expresses a form of surrealism, where the transcription of a parallel world takes the form of automatic writing, in the literal sense.
Unclassifiable, Amable Arias’s work is a great rarity on the art market. He died in 1984 at the age of 55. His singularity is matched only by his poetry.
See original version (French)
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Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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