Bajo el sol (Under the Sun)

Mathias Goeritz had a cosmopolitan career as a painter, sculptor, architect, designer and art critic in several different countries. The time he spent in Spain, from 1945 to 1949, was fundamental in the recovery of the Spanish avant-garde during the post-war period. Bajo el sol (Under the Sun) is from the same year that Goeritz founded the Altamira School in Santillana del Mar, having perceived the need to broaden the Spanish art scene of the times and embrace contemporaneity, to counteract the academicism of official art. For the members of the group, the prehistoric cave paintings in Altamira were a symbol of art “outside of a historic time” and they became a point of reference in the search for an art of the present but with roots in the Iberian Peninsula. His plastic experimentation, disseminated in different forums and publications, was materialised in an abstraction based on ideograms and a strong presence of spontaneous gesture, midway between the primitive and the childlike. Bajo el sol is a manifestation of this new art being attempted through a return to the primeval. With it, Spain’s art world would make its contribution to the evolution of European art in the years immediately following the war.