ARTIST: Enrique Gil Guerra (Spanish, 1912 - 1996)
NAME: Spanish Girl Playing Guitar
MEDIUM: oil on canvas
CONDITION: Restretched. Few minor scrathes/paint losses. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 28 x 23 inches / 71 x 58 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed (In-House framing available)
SIGNATURE: lower left
PROVENANCE: Arnot Gallery NY (has gallery stamp on verso)
SKU#: 119846
US Shipping $75 + insurance.

BIOGRAPHY:
Enrique Gil Guerra was born and lived in Madrid. Son of Enrique Gil Perez, engraver and goldsmith, descendant of a relative living in Almagro (Ciudad Real) and of Leandra Guerra Galindo, descendant of Leonese. He was orphaned of a father at the age of three, entering as an intern at the Colegio de Orfanos de San Ildefonso, where he already manifested his artistic vocation. Magnificent drawings of the artist made with 12 and 13 years of age are still preserved.For this reason he entered in 1927, at the age of 15, as a student at the San Fernando Superior School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving in Madrid, graduating in 1932. Also under the tutelage of Benedito, he began his first teaching practices, a vocation that, together with that of a painter, would accompany him for the rest of his life.During his stay at the San Fernando School he obtained high marks that led him to enjoy the so-called "Summer Pensioners", summer stays in various places of the Spanish geography under the direction of some teachers, in which the students of the They took advantage of the school to get to know other regions and practice their art in other environments. Among the most important for his future work are pensioners in Mallorca, Betanzos and Granada. In the summer of 1931 he completed a boarding school in the Alhambra.After graduating from the School, he performed the Military Service to then approve the Oppositions of Professor of the Institute of Painting and Drawing in 1936.For this reason, already in the postwar period, his first activities were oriented towards the field of advertising drawing, which had more economic and professional activity at that time. At this time, one of his professional lines of action began, which he would maintain for many years after his retirement as a teacher. With the pseudonym of Nique and sometimes with his own surname, he signs and develops work for various advertising firms, especially for the Madrid company Valeriano Perez (and later Hijos de Valeriano Perez). His advertising works were highly recognized and awarded on various occasions (Jerez Fair, Diario Pueblo, etc.).In the teaching field, after the civil war, he joined the Madrid School of Arts and Crafts (after Applied Arts and Artistic Trades) working both at the headquarters on Calle de la Palma and at other locations in Madrid. His favorite disciplines were statue drawing, painting, and advertising drawing. He reached retirement in 1982.His central activity, which he did not abandon until shortly before his death, was always oil painting. From 1942 he worked in his own studio that he located in the three homes that he successively occupied in Madrid. His incessant production allowed him to develop a large number of oil works, with more sporadic ones in watercolor and drawings in blood or charcoal. He held various exhibitions in Madrid rooms, the ones prepared for the MacarrГіn and AlcГіn rooms being very prominent.His style is framed within the realism of the early twentieth century, although from the '70s his painting progressively approaches impressionism.His work goes through various phases. It is easy to recognize during his studies in San Fernando a brief, but true, influence of Vazquez Diaz's cubism . It is not strange, since Gil Guerra is a student of the School in a course after Salvador Dali's, initially a follower of the same artist. After the Civil War, he focused on his natural tendency to realism both in portraiture, of which he was a faithful exponent, and in landscape or figure. He cultivates popular Spanish folkloric motifs, reflecting on his canvases the typical characters from different regions, especially Andalusians (gypsies, water carriers, etc.), or rural urban landscapes. The last period of his artistic life progressively evolved towards impressionism, reaching a compromise between the realism that had always characterized him, the figure and impressionism.Between 1934 and 1992 he made a large number of portraits and oil paintings that, to a large extent, were acquired by galleries and individuals from the United States, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Sweden, France, England, Belgium, Japan, Spain, among others.As a publicist he also achieved great renown both in professional and academic activity. He was a professor of the disciplines of Advertising Drawing at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Trades in Madrid.In the professional field of advertising, its best-known advertisement is the Anos de la Asturiana , which appeared 5 or 6 times a year without interruption for almost 50 years (between 1950 and 1998), coinciding with the main national holidays, on the back cover of the newspaper. ABC of Madrid and Seville. It featured an image of La Asturiana (according to a drawing created and developed by Nike , which was Gil Guerra's professional nickname for his advertising activities) in an allegory of the date or event celebrated in each case. Perhaps it is one of the advertisements that, at least in Spain, have been maintained with hardly any modifications (except for the evolution of the artist himself), for a longer period.