On June 23, 2020, the deliberation of the selection jury for the announcing poster took place, which will be the 87th edition of the traditional Autumn Salon, which will be held from October 29 to November 29, 2020 at the Casa of Cows of the Retiro Park of Madrid.
The jury was chaired by José Gabriel Astudillo López, President of the AEPE, acting as Secretary of the same Mª Dolores Barreda Pérez, General Secretary of the AEPE, and counting on the Members Juan Manuel López-Reina, Vice-president of the AEPE, Antonio Téllez, Paloma Casado, Carmen Bonilla Carrasco, Fernando de Marta, Ana Martínez Córdoba and Itziar Zabalza Murillo.
As José Gabriel Astudillo explains, “for the Spanish Association of Painters and Sculptors it is very special to have an identifying image of the Autumn Salon, and that it be a work of the members of our institution, who thus regain prominence in the Autumn Salon ”.
The winning work is from the Honorary Partner of our institution, Alejandro Aguilar Soria, whom we congratulate from these lines, entitled “Self-portrait in Autumn”.
Alejandro Aguilar Soria
Alejandro Aguilar Soria (Madrid, 1962), graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, also studying Interior Architecture and Public Relations and Advertising.
From her earliest childhood she lived with artists and intellectuals of the first order who populated her house and visited her grandfather, Francisco Soria Aedo and her mother, Fernanda Soria, recognized and unjustly forgotten artists, from whom she learned the cleanliness of the line, drawing and the coloristic technique that gives so much strength to his works. His experience in these years will deeply mark his later, classic and avant-garde artistic practice.
A teacher at various art schools, a study assistant to other great masters, he reacted to the conceptual trends typical of the 1980s and began his personal artistic career in a painting completely identifiable with his curious and dreamy personality. Currently, and after a stage as a gallery owner in which success distanced him from his true passion, he directs his own painting studio, Estudio Larso, and has more than thirty years of teaching that have earned him the recognition of artists and teachers.
Multidisciplinary artist, his work covers a wide spectrum of expressive forms: photography, installation, drawing, visual poetry, printmaking, but it is painting that occupies most of his production.
The thematic axis that unifies the work of Aguilar Soria, are the symbols, signs and pictograms and their interrelation with their own and imagined environments.
In his oils and acrylics, his characters, generally anonymous men and women, are often seen with trivial, mute and also mysterious postures and appearances, with elements as capricious as the prolongation of their limbs in unusual objects that become the keys hidden that suggest the relationship of these figures with each other and with the viewer.
Among his references: the night, the city, the history of art, cinema, photography, society, religion, culture, death, sex, animals, iconic and legendary images, etc. Any aspect that influences the formation of contemporary being has a place in its repertoire of ideas and reflections.
However, there is a common denominator in his work, in his thought and in his work: the idealized modern man. Aguilar Soria raises the idea of the multiple man, the communicator, the one who sees everything and manages everything, the close and passionate, the one who minimizes himself with nature and the urban landscape, with galaxies and the elements.
He has held important individual exhibitions, among which “Iconographic Maps” stand out, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla-La Mancha (Hellín. Albacete, 2009), “Icônes”, at the D´Art du Rhône Gallery (Genève. Suisse, 2005), “Games”, in Banking Credit Suisse (Madrid, 2001), “Exp. Multimedia ”, at the C.M. (Madrid, 2000), ”Fractals”, at the Elvira Carreras Gallery (Madrid, 1998), “Pictograms”, at the Laberinto Gallery (Granada, 1995), “Encounters”, at the Arsenal Museum (San Juan de Puerto Rico , 1984) … the last one took place in the Madrid Casa de Vacas del Parque del Buen Retiro in 2018, which won him excellent press and public reviews.
A large number of private collections and important cultural institutions have works by this artist, with many works that he has exhibited in places as exceptional as the Museo de Las Escuelas de Luzón, ITIMUSEUM in Argentina, the Volpe Stessens Foundation in Buenos Aires, the Museum Manege of Modern Art of Saint Petersburg, Sharjah Art Museum of United Arab Emirates, the National Library of Madrid, the Enzo Marini Foundation of Bologna, the Fine Arts Circle of Madrid, the Museum of Decorative Arts of Madrid, etc.
Member of the XIII Salon, “Eduardo Chicharro” Painting Prize of the LXXIX Madrid Autumn Salon and the First Prize of the XXIV Animalistic Art Exhibition of the San Antón Academy of Art and Letters, has to his credit other distinctions such as the Diogenes Taborda Grand Prize from the Volpe Stessens Foundation in Buenos Aires and the Painting Prize from the Eureka Hall in Madrid.
All information is available on the AEPE website, tab “Contests and prizes”, sub-tab “Autumn Salon” 2020.
