Four National Art Prize Winners

José Balmes, Gracia Barrios, Roser Bru and Guillermo Núñez, four of Chile's most important artists, bring their artistic trajectories together in this exhibition curated by Inés Ortega-Márquez. The show consists of approximately 200 works of art by these four committed creators—all recipients of Chile's National Art Prize—centered on two periods: 1960–1973, marked by the pictorial revolution and the military coup; and 1974–1990, characterized the exile. This is the first time that the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago features the works of these four artists. The event is also an occasion to corroborate the analogies and convergences between their trajectories, along with their shared connections to the 1950s generation of artists and their recognized influence in the Chilean University Reform of 1968. The four artists studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Universidad de Chile and were taught by painter Pablo Burchard. In 1947, along with other creators, they formed the Grupo de Estudiantes Plásticos (GEP). In this exhibition, viewers will be exposed to the pictorial evolution of Balmes, Barrios, Bru, and Núñez; their incursions into Informalism, as a reaction against the predominant academic current of those years, and the inclusion of collage and objects in their painting. Another connection between these artists is their condition of migrants for political reasons: José Balmes and Roser Bru fled from the Spanish Civil War and arrived in Chile aboard the Winnipeg. After the Chilean military coup of 1973, Barrios and Balmes exiled in 1974 and Núñez followed suit in 1975. These profound experiences marked their artistic works, which are characterized by a shared stylistic, thematic, and ideological coherence.