Juan Navarro Baldeweg

Santander, 1939

Juan Navarro Baldeweg was born in Santander in 1939. His work as a painter has evolved simultaneously along with his significant career as an architect. "He is a painter that designs buildings, and an architect that creates paintings", has been said about him.

Different lines, colours, and shapes combine together as a continuous whole in the painter’s work to provide rhythm to his paintings. Navarro Baldeweg does not copy reality, but rather expresses feelings that intensify those elements engraved in his mind. And this is how Hunting Scene was created, with its trees, the hunter and his dog, and the piece being chased. His conception of painting is a reminder of the Japanese illustrations’ schematic representation.

The aim of the author’s painting is to show elements that emit energy, and from which every-day events come up and spread out, reaching the spectators’ senses. The lines through which he shapes each one of the elements in his oil paintings transmit their role in their original context. Each element expresses something different, but the painting as a whole generates a flow of rhythmic feelings of extraordinary vitality that grasps the spectator’s attention.

Navarro Baldeweg has been awarded with important prizes: the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Endowment for the Arts) in 1990, or the Medalla al Mérito en las Bellas Artes (Fine Arts medal) in 2007. Likewise, he is a member of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts School) de San Fernando since 2003. His work is exposed in important public collections in the US and Europe. In Madrid his paintings can be seen at the Reina Sofía Museum.

As an architect, some of his most popular projects are the Canal de Madrid Theatre (2007), the Cuevas de Altamira Museum (2000), and the Festivales de Santander Palace (1985).

2010 Juan Navarro Baldeweg Hunting Scene Oil painting on canvas 165 x 130 cm