This exhibition revolves around the early work of the painter Juan Luis Goenaga (San Sebastián, 1950–Madrid, 2024), who recently passed away. It examines a brief period of creative experimentation in the early 1970s when the artist—who was barely 20 years old—found abstraction of the values of the Basque Country’s nature and countryside to be a powerful source of inspiration for his work.

Curated by the historian Mikel Letxundi (from the museum's Archive and Documentation Department), the author of the major monograph on the artist published in 2018, the exhibition Juan Luis Goenaga. Alkiza, 1971–1976 brings together works from that period made with different techniques, often experimentally: oil, enamel, crayon, ink, gouache and watercolour applied to canvas or paper, as well as object boxes and photographs, some of them of plants and others documenting the small land art works that the artist made during his immersive outings into the forest.

The 100 works in the exhibition are also representative of the different series in which Goenaga organised his works in those years: Itzalak (shadows), 1972–1973; Belarrak (grass), 1973; Larruak (skins) and Hari-matazak (skeins), 1974; Sustraiak (roots) 1974–1976; and Marroiak (browns) and Kataratak (waterfalls), 1976.

Many of the works belong to the artist’s collection, and they are joined by works from private collections in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia and Basque museums and institutions, including the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of the Basque Country Artium Museoa, San Telmo Museum, Kutxa Foundation and the BBVA Collection.

Juan Luis Goenaga—along with his children Bárbara and Telmo—worked closely with museum to prepare the exhibition, which has unexpectedly become an homage to the Basque painter after his untimely death on 13 August of this year.

The show has the support of Petronor, a member of the board of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum Foundation.

Exhibition Juan Luis Goenaga. Alkiza, 1971-1976

Just like other Basque artists from different generations working in those years—from Oteiza to Mendiburu—the lay of the land, vegetation, mythology and ethnography of the Basque Country, as well as the legacy of Basque prehistory, exerted a deep fascination on Goenaga.

He internalised all these elements to include incorporate them in his creative pursuits, making them one of his hallmarks. This became particularly expressive during a brief period after he moved his house-workshop to the Otsamendi farmhouse in the small town of Alkiza (Gipuzkoa) in the early 1970s. It is a humid landscape of limy soils, streams and forests peppered with the legacy of traditional life in the guise of farmhouses, mills and foundries, where Goenaga found a primeval world and an attachment to the land that left a lasting mark on his oeuvre.

For the next six years, nature was the main theme of his work until a shift in 1977, when he added figuration with a denser and more colourful materiality. From then on, he alternated both languages in a style all his own without concessions to anyone or anything else.

The paintings from Goenaga’s early questing and defining period are empirical in nature, which is reflected in all his creative expressions. Because he used such close shots that capture details of light and texture, like a microscope, the black and white photographs of leaves on the ground, branches and grass seem like those of the pioneers of scientific photography. In other images, he documented his compositions of furrows and alignments of stones and sticks in the midst of nature, which evoke vestiges and signs of early humanity, like small-scale monuments. In this land art, Goenaga translated his readings of Pío Baroja, Father José Miguel de Barandiarán and Jorge Oteiza, which connected him with Basque animism and ancestral enigmas. His wood and glass boxes made with fragmentary remains of household implements and traditional trades that he found on his outings on Mount Ernio also have this animist, memorial feel.

The choice of earth tones, greens and greys also connects with this ascetic, essential view of nature, and Goenaga applied them in almost monochromatic compositions with minimal figurative elements. Grass and branches succeed one another in waves like an obsessive reiteration until they wholly cover the surface of the canvas or paper, like a visual mantra.

At the end of this period, Goenaga introduced a new energy into his works, leading to reddish images that closed his particular natural history from those years.

Juan Luis Goenaga (San Sebastián, 1950–Madrid, 2024), a largely self-taught artist, got his start painting and drawing at a very young age in San Sebastián, first with the painters Julián Ugarte and José Camps, after that at the Artists’ Association of Gipuzkoa and even later in relation to the modernising art of the Ur and Gaur groups (1965). Between 1968 and 1969, he travelled to Madrid, Paris and Rome, and he lived for a time in Barcelona, where he learned engraving at the Book Arts Conservatory and briefly studied at the Sant Jordi Fine Arts School.

He returned to San Sebastián determined to learn on his own, and in 1969 he moved to Alkiza (Gipuzkoa), a rural setting where he worked in isolation in the 1970s, in constant contact with the landscape around him. There, representations of real elements like grass, branches and roots he found along his walks enabled him to create unusual images of enormous poetic and telluric power, like his painting series Itzalak (shadows), 1972–1973; Larruak (skins) and Hari-matazak (skeins), 1974; and Sustraiak (roots), 1974–1976.

In those years, references to nature and the primitive were a hallmark of his artistic practice, which was not limited to painting but was also expressed through photography—between 1971 and 1972 he made an important set of snapshots in the remote roads and spots on Mount Ernio that are pioneers in land art—and the construction of sculptural objects. Some of these works were exhibited with his paintings at the Municipal Culture Galleries in Durango (Bizkaia) in 1973. A few months earlier, Goenaga had held his first solo exhibition at San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián.

After this early exposure, he went through a period of many exhibitions, with solo shows in Bilbao (Lúzaro, 1974 and 1977; Arteta, 1977), San Sebastián (El Pez, 1974 and 1979; Galería B, 1976), Vitoria-Gasteiz (Eder Arte, 1976) and Madrid (Iolas-Velasco, 1976). In 1978, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum hosted a major exhibition of his works.

One year earlier, the museum had acquired its first work by the artist: Roots (1976). This work was later joined by others, either through purchases, like Untitled (1976); or donations, including Untitled (1975) and Untitled (c.1975); along with drawing and two photographs from Lúzaro gallery, other essential examples of Goenaga’s work from that period. In 2022, his representation in the museum was expanded with the acquisition of a photograph album with fifty-nine pictures from 1971–1973.

Goenaga travelled to Germany in the early 1980s and was influenced by German neo-expressionism, which had been latent in his earlier works (Anthropomorphs and Androgynous series), and the Italian transavantgarde. He began to apply thick, impasto-like paint to the canvas using a gestural approach. He also brought back the human figure during this period and made figurative works with urban figures and locations. In 1980, he moved back to San Sebastián for a period, although he returned to Alkiza three years later.

At that time, his work was garnering major public accolades, like the first prize he shared with Zumeta at the First Donostia Painting Biennial in 1985 and first prize in painting at the Gure Artea competition organised by the Basque Government in 1987. He also held major solo exhibitions in Madrid (1986 and 1989), New York (1987) and Paris (1985 and 1988), and he worked in the latter for extended periods until 1990.

His Arkeolojiak (Archaeologies, 1991) series signalled a shift back to atavistic, mythological images that revisited nature and the magical, a course that lasted through the turn of the millennium in which he developed both paintings and notable works on paper.

Some of these pieces were displayed for the first time in his retrospective held at the Palacio Aranburu in Tolosa (Gipuzkoa) in 1999. Four years earlier, the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea in San Sebastián had held the first anthology of his work from 1969 to 1995, curated by Edorta Kortadi and accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Juan Manuel Bonet, María José Aranzasti, Maya Aguiriano and Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea. Sáenz de Gorbea has written several critical texts of interest in the different stages of Goenaga’s career in the newspaper Deia. Other important exhibitions were the ones held at the Fundación Vital in Vitoria-Gasteiz (2017) and at the Sala Kubo Kutxa in San Sebastián (2020), the latter curated by the historian Mikel Lertxundi Galiana, the author of the latest major monograph on the oeuvre of Juan Luis Goenaga (San Sebastián, Nerea, 2018).

In December 2022, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum gave him the Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea Artistic Commitment Award.

(Text by Miriam Alzuri Milanés. Modern and Contemporary Art Curator)