The Museum of Navarra and the Museo Universidad de Navarra inaugurated this Thursday Of Beauty and the Sacredthe first retrospective of the Navarrese painter Isabel Baquedano (Mendavia, 1929 - Madrid, 2018), one of the most personal artists of Spanish painting in the second half of the 20th century. The show, which can be visited at both venues until January 10, has been co-produced with the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, where it was exhibited last spring.

This is the first time that the different periods of the artist's work can be seen in Pamplona. She was a preeminent figure of the so-called Pamplona School and a professor of painting at the School of Arts and Crafts of the capital of Navarre. There she was the teacher of many of the contemporary Navarrese painters.

The itinerary begins with the drawings and works from the early 1950s, which open the exhibition at the Museum of Navarra. In total, 290 works from the artist's collection, museums, foundations and private collections are on display. In addition to the paintings, photographs, drawings and documents are exhibited that allow a deeper insight into Baquedano's career. In the words of Ángel Bados, curator of the exhibition together with Miriam Alzuri, the aritsta was "the owner of a clean and decisive drawing and dazzling color, the artist knew how to work quickly and intensely in search of her own style".

The tour allows to know the artistic development of Baquedano, whose work evolves in a few years from the realistic figuration of social content to iconographies of great formal economy, close in some aspects to Pop art. It was in the 1970s when his works reached a certain realist plenitude.

Despite the changes in technique in the different periods, the works exhibited in both venues maintain the same biographical function, "as if the lived and the painted were correlative. This leads us to think that painting allowed him to take a symbolic position in the world and with others, making the viewer a participant in his adventure, through the latent enigma of the paintings and through their own rare beauty," Bados emphasizes.

Baquedano's work evolved as he imbibed the different currents of his time, within his general interest in Art History, but interpreting them in a personal way, always driven by his desire to learn and enjoy the pictorial process more than the final result, without caring about recognition or fame. His work covers a diverse range of subjects, from the themes with a clear social component of his early periods, to those linked to the classical world or the sacred history of his final stage, passing through others linked to symbolic aesthetics, urban landscapes or his everyday environment.