BARCELONA, SPAIN.-The exhibition Ramón Gaya,. A time for Painting, which will be open to the public in the Exhibition Hall of the Pedrera from July 18 to October 1 2006, presents more than a hundred works by the artist Ramón Gaya (Murcia 1910 - Valencia 2005). Painter, draughtsman, essayist and poet, he is regarded as one of the foremost exponents of contemporary figuration in Spain. This retrospective exhibition, curated by Juan Manuel Bonet, includes a wide selection of paintings and works in gouache and pastel and offers an overview of his lengthy artistic career.

The first section of the exhibit presents his first formative paintings, which within the context of the Generation of 27, between the neo-popularists and the Boresians. On a trip to Paris in 1928, he participated in a collective exhibition in the prestigious Galerie des Quatre Chemins. It was during his stay there that he became deeply disappointed after seeing the avant-garde works of modernity. This led him to embark on a solitary journey of devotion to classical painting, continuing in the figurative tradition, whose point of reference was the Prado Museum known as the “Spanish rock”, which houses works of the great masters such as Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt. During the years of the Spanish Republic, he worked in collaboration with García Lorca's Barraca and Cossío's Museo Ambulante de las Misiones Pedagógicas. During the Spanish Civil War he drew posters and illustrations for Hora de España. At the end of the war, after a period spent in a refugee camp in Saint Cyprien (Roussillon), he went into exile. The next section of the exhibition presents his years of exile in Mexico, until recently one of the lesser-known periods of his career, from which a number of his works will be displayed for the first time in Spain.

The 1950s marked Gaya's return to Europe, with stays in Paris, Rome, Florence and Venice. It was also the period when he wrote some of his most important books, including Diario de un pintor, 1952-1953 and El sentimiento de la pintura (1960). This section of the exhibition is complemented by the screening of the documentary La Serenísima (2006), directed by Gonzalo Ballester, in which the artist himself reads a number of passages from his diary. In the 1960s, Gaya returned to Spain and wrote his most outstanding book Velázquez, pájaro solitario. His works from these years, together with the following decade, form the main core of the exhibition.

The seventies, eighties and nineties were a time of Ramón Gaya's happy rediscovery of his native Spain, where he received a number of awards, including the Nacional de Artes Plásticas Prize and the first Velázquez Prize. The exhibition concludes with several works painted in early 2000.

The exhibition draws together paintings from the Museo Ramón Gaya of Murcia, the MNCARS of Madrid, the IVAM of Valencia, the Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo of Madrid, as well as numerous private collections, the most important of which come from collections held in Barcelona, Madrid, Murcia and Valencia, and also from Mexico DF and New York.

The catalogue of the exhibition will be published in Catalan and Spanish and will include essays by Giorgio Agamben, Juan Manuel Bonet, José Jiménez Lozano, Patrick Mauriès, José Luis Pardo, and will feature an unpublished text by Gaya himself.