EUGENIO FERNÁNDEZ GRANELL

Eugenio Granell was born in A Coruña in 1912. Since he was a child he always drew and painted. "I was born a surrealist, as a child I drew fantastic architecture and castles and when I met the surrealists I knew that I had already done that before" Granell studied violin at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid's Higher School of Music.

After the Civil War (1936-39) and after the loss of the anti-fascist republican side he went into exile in Paris, where he met Benjamin Peret and Wilfredo Lam.

The exhibition curator and director of the Casa de la Parra, Pilar Corredoira, contributes to her biography an anecdote that explains the extreme needs of the artist: "He gave music classes and designed furniture"

He received asylum in Santo Domingo, where he became part of the Symphony Orchestra as first violin. His musical knowledge increased his friendship with Enrique Casal Chapí, who was the first director of the Spanish National Symphony Orchestra. With a versatile artistic production, Granell made a pictorial journey through various tendencies until he was definitively framed in surrealism, which he himself described as “a way of understanding life, with precedents in history and that André Breton institutionalized in 1924 with the Surrealist Manifesto ”. Who he met in 1940.

In 1943 he held his first exhibition at the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo.

After living in France, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala, in Puerto Rico and in Los Angeles, he moved to New York in 1957. There he regularly exhibited at the Bodley Gallery and participated in important collectives such as the 1962 MoMA. It was the time of his world consecration with exhibitions in Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires, Belgium, Holland and Chicago, among others. In New York, he received his doctorate in sociology and anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York, and from 1960 he was Professor of Spanish Literature at Brooklyn College until he retired in 1985.

In 1969 he set up his studio in Olmeda de las Fuentes where he moved with his wife after his retirement.

He was a professor at several American universities and collaborated in multiple magazines as a writer and illustrator both in America and  Europe.

Surrealism was for Granell "personal religion" as well "vital attitude" this movement defines the " owm  and profound reality of he sees things without limitations or logical barriers"  as stated on some occasion by himself. In this movement he concidered the humor as something fundamental because it is "An escape valve from the anguish that human beings sometimes suffer"

Experts say Granell's painting is a kingdom of uncertainty, of hybridisations, encounters and metamorphoses.

Thus, the pictorial work of this Coruña, "citizen of the world", is replete with symbolic and alchemical elements, very colorful, like mirrors or philosophical stones hidden under other supposed names. In its last stage a lack of perspective can be observed and consequently the raid of the pictorial set. In addition to a greater use of black, both as a contour line that generates shapes and as another autonomous color.

On October 25, 2001 he passed away in Madrid. His body rests in the Olmeda cemetery.

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