b-guided > Barcelona

b-inspired Exhibitions

Sonia Delaunay

Graphic work

10.11.22

The Galería Guntrian hosts till November 12th an exhibition of lithographs of the simultaneist painter and designer.

A unique show since they come from the personal collection of the gallery’s owners, three Canadians who have brought graphic works by 20th century artists to Barcelona.

  • Grenoble

  • Sonia Delaunay-Terk (Gradizsk, today Ukraine, 1885-Paris, France, 1979) was, jointly with her couple Robert Delaunay and other artists, the founder of Orphism, a synthesis of the saturated colours of Fauvism, the chromatic juxtapositions and experimentation of Post-Impressionism, and the planes and truncated shapes of Cubism.

  • Interested in the study of colour, light and movement, she became known for her abstract and audacious works with a fondness for geometric expression. Her fascination with the concept of simultaneous contrast manifested itself in her early collages, book bindings, small painted boxes, cushions, waistcoats, lampshades and one of her first large-scale works, the painting 'Le bal Bullier', which represented a popular Parisian dance hall. At the same time she was producing gowns, a combination of squares and triangles in taffeta, tulle, flannel, moiré and corded silk. She called these experiments Simultanéisme.

  • During the First World War the Delaunays fled to Spain. In this exile Sonia travelled a lot, painted still lifes and market scenes and worked as an interior decorator in Madrid. She started to work with fabrics and textiles in 1923 once back in Paris. She founded her own company, Boutique Simultanée, exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, and in the 1930s gained an international reputation, collaborating with major New York department stores and designing film costumes.

  • In the catalog of the first female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre during her lifetime (1964) are 'Grenoble’, that, with her written name, in 1974 served as a poster for her exhibition in that French city; ‘Beekeeper’, the start of an alphabet with a swarm of letters, and ‘Red Propeller’, which recovered that of an oil painted by her
    husband, ‘Hommage a Blériot’, a tribute to a pioneer of French aviation.