'Esteban Vicente. Thresholds of Light'

The exhibition 'Esteban Vicente. Thresholds of Light' brings to the islands for the first time a selection of works by this outstanding figure of 20th-century Spanish painting. Esteban Vicente (Turégano, Segovia, 1903 – Bridgehampton, 2001) was one of the most singular figures in 20th-century painting. Trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, he moved in the cultural circles of the Generación del 27 and discovered the European avant-gardes through his travels to Paris. After a period marked by the influence of the Mediterranean landscape — particularly during his time in Ibiza — he left Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War and settled in New York, the city that would become the axis of his artistic career. During the 1940s he underwent a decisive shift towards abstraction. Cubism and collage allowed him to explore new ways of constructing pictorial space, moving progressively away from traditional representation. In the 1950s he became associated with the New York School and Abstract Expressionism, while developing his own language rooted in colour, light, transparency, and spatial organisation. For Vicente, abstraction did not mean breaking with reality, but transforming it. Landscape remained present as memory, atmosphere, and structure. Alongside his artistic practice, he taught at prestigious American institutions. Recognised in both the United States and Spain, he received major honours and left behind a body of work that bridges the European tradition with the renewal of contemporary American painting.