Julián Grau Santos

Canfranc (Huesca), 1937

He is the son of painters Emilio Grau Sala and Ángeles Santos. His academic training was at the San Jordi Fine Arts Academy in Barcelona, an institution which as early as 1966 granted him third prize in its painting contest. Since then, his career as a painter has been prolific and intense, and he has exhibited work in more than one hundred museums worldwide and received all kinds of awards.

He lived in Paris during the Civil War, where he had the opportunity to get to know the work of the impressionists and post-impressionists which later so influenced him.

Like post-impressionists, Grau Santos applied a meticulous brush stroke, with great expressiveness, attenuating perspective to allow the emotional register to prevail. He transforms the model to be represented with an essentialist and constructive sketch based on geometric structures in the manner of Seurat, and with a way of distributing light which approaches stage scenography.

Following in the wake of Cézanne, he wrought together drawing and colour in a radical synthesis. He recreated the natural elements through colour, making objects cease to exist as such and the drawing appear to be the result, and not the origin, of the clever use of colour. This is what he achieves in his oil painting "Mujer con vestido rosa" (Woman in a Pink Dress) with which, with expressive elegance, he made his own mark on the UEE collection in 1984.

This same subtlety and distinction was the common thread which he often used in his illustrations for the pages of the weekly supplement "Blanco y Negro", a classic of illustration in the Spanish press.

1984 Julián Grau Santos Woman in a Pink Dress Oil on canvas 73 x 60 cm.