Manuel Avellaneda

Manuel Avellaneda Gomez Murcia, December 24, 1938 - Murcia, August 27, 2003) was a Spanish painter who reflected in his paintings the arid landscapes and seascapes of his homeland, recovering in the twentieth century the philosophical aesthetics of the Generation of 98 and the del27. He began drawing studies in his hometown, which soon continued in Murcia. In 1957 he moved to Madrid to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. There he met Benjamín Palencia who would discover for him the poetics of the second Vallecas School, also making friends with the hyperrealist Antonio López.1 In 1964 he was a founding member of the Aunar group together with the painters José María Párraga and Aurelio Pérez Martínez and the sculptors Elisa Séiquer, José Hernández Cano and the Toledo Sánchez brothers; ephemeral group oriented to the renewal and rupture in the traditional Murcian artistic scene.2 In 1971 he was commissioned to paint the murals for the international fair that took place in the Casa de Campo in Madrid and from that moment on he began to exhibit regularly in the Murcian art galleries Chys y Zero. In his work, especially in the treatment of landscapes, in which color played the central role, there are influences from the second Vallecana school. In this sense, Manuel Avellaneda is his best representative as a chronicler of the Murcian landscape, of its countryside and more arid spaces: Landscape of Cieza, Landscape of Ulea or Landscape of Puerto Lumbreras, and also of seascapes that he endowed with more color: Calm in Mazarrón. At the end of the eighties he had already developed a much more personal style and incorporated other themes into his work, from small still lifes to larger formats; although always faithful to his work as a landscaper. In 1996 he made the poster for the Burial of the Sardine in Murcia.3 He also worked on watercolor, influenced by his countryman Ramón Gaya, and as a book illustrator: Tierras Murcianas de Azorí and Tierras de Castilla de Ortega y Gasset. Throughout his life he made exhibitions in: Madrid, Palma de Mallorca, Alicante, Albacete, Valladolid, Salamanca, Santander, Zaragoza, Seville, London, Lyon, Basel... His work can be found in the following museums: Museo de Bellas Arts of Murcia, Azorín House Museum in Alicante, in the Zabaleta de Quesada Museum, Jaen Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Engraving, in Marbella.