Clara Gangutia

Contemporary Basque Painter

Donostia / San Sebastian, 1952

From the age of 10 she started studying painting to enter the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, a goal she achieved in the 1968-69 academic year and strongly influenced her approach to contemporary painting and her understanding of pictorial structure and observation, being her teacher Antonio López.

In 1970 she makes a learning trip to Paris, where she came into contact with international artistic movements that would later resonate in her pictorial language, with the painters Juan Manuel Contreras, a study colleague, and Roberto González.

In 1973 she met the painter Jesús Ibáñez, her future husband. Leave the Academy of San Fernando without finishing the courses. In spite of this, she is retired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in 1974, with a stay at the Academy of Spain in Rome that, along with other classmates, she will not end up because of the conventional and rigid atmosphere that exists in her. She toured Italy and it was then that his admiration for Venetian painting increased.

In 2000 she presented work in an anthology held at the Conde Duque de Madrid Center, consolidating her presence within the Spanish and Basque contemporary art scene. The artist from San Sebastian exhibits more than 100 works, including several drawings from her early years, urban landscapes from Madrid, and views of Gipuzkoa, where landscape becomes a recurring subject in her pictorial research.