Mujeres de la vida (Women of the Night)

A decisive influence on Gutiérrez Solana’s interest in engravings was his friendship with Ricardo Baroja, a pre-eminent engraver and chronicler of his generation, driving him to create, with Manuel Castro-Gil, a series of prints in which he explored, with a language in proximity to that which he used in his drawings and paintings, themes related to the excluded and the invisible in society. Solana shone a light on figures inhabiting a city which grew unsystematically to accommodate people emigrating from other Spanish provinces to work as day labourers, domestic workers or tradesmen. Those emigrating would ultimately work non-regulated jobs, toiling as rag-and-bone men, beggars or prostitutes in the disjointed quarters that were sprouting up on the outskirts of Madrid. In these liminal places and humble characters, the artist found the motifs to make stark prints which today still raise questions over social differences in the context of major cities.

José Manuel Lara Oliveros