Emilio Gañán. Hipocampo

We end the 2024 exhibition season by presenting Hipocampo, the recent project of one of the artists with the longest association with our gallery, Emilio Gañán (Plasencia, Spain, 1971). Painter, curator and professor of painting at the University of Salamanca, Gañán has developed a solid career in the field of visual arts, and his works are part of important private and institutional collections, both in Spain and abroad.
Since his first exhibition at the Fernando Pradilla gallery in 2005, entitled Línea sobre plano, Emilio Gañán has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, consolidating himself as a relevant figure in contemporary abstraction. Hipocampo is his eighth exhibition in our gallery, and continues his analysis of the forms that combine the austerity of straight lines with the intensity of colour and pictorial gesture, giving rise to what Javier Hernando defined as “sensitive geometry”, perhaps recalling Ibero-American painters whose work also appreciates the sensuality of matter coexisting with intricate linear formulations.

In 2021, as a result of this collaboration, the gallery published Puerto Metafísico, a volume that reviews Gañán's artistic career in depth. This book brings together analyses by prestigious contemporary art scholars such as José Jiménez and Alfonso de la Torre, who highlight the reflective and experimental nature of Emilio Gañán's work.

In his oeuvre, Gañán reinterprets the contributions of constructivism, neoplasticism and minimalism. Among the referential forms that characterize his research, the grid stands out, which, in the painter's words, “can be interpreted metaphorically as a diagram of the functioning of thought. Furthermore, the grid is a recurring paradigm of modern art. This iconographic resource allows not only to avoid the direct representation of “reality”, but also to point towards a spiritual dimension” [E.G].

Emilio Gañán’s work is therefore framed within the traditions of plastic research typical of the historical avant-gardes. His abstract approach, based on geometry, reflects a lyrical vocation that seeks to establish an emotional connection with disciplines such as architecture and music.

With Hipocampo, the title of the exhibition, Gañán seeks to awaken the feeling of estrangement, connecting at the same time the various meanings of the term: the poetic analogies that the seahorse -Hippocampus- can inspire and, on the other hand, the cerebral organ, modulator of memory and spatial perception.

The new works of Hipocampo reveal the traces of the creative process itself, while establishing that trance between the rational and the subjective that runs through all of Emilio Gañán's artistic production, and the spectator will explore a compositional whole where the experience of colour, composition and form conquer the space like a musical piece.

Emilio Gañán holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca, specializing in Painting. His works can be found in the collections of the National Library of Spain, the Regional Government of Castile and León, the Norman Foster Collection (United Kingdom), the Faculty of Geography and History in Salamanca, the El Brocense Cultural Institution in Cáceres, the National Institute of Statistics in Madrid, the Caja Extremadura Collection, the Official College of Architects of Extremadura in Cáceres, the Regional Government of Extremadura, the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome, the Extremadura and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC) in Badajoz, the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, the El Monte Foundation in Seville, the Institute of Neurosciences in Alicante, among others. Emilio Gañán is currently a professor of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca.