Biography and Works of Carlos Sanz

San Sebastian, 1943- 1987

Basque painter, artist and poet, belonging to the figurativist current that emerged in Gipuzkoa in the last years of the 1960s. His work, in which he expressed his obsession with hemophilia, a disease he suffered from, is part of the most significant and select of the Basque pictorial avant-garde.

Although his great interest was always in having studied Philosophy and Letters, since this discipline did not exist during his years in San Sebastian, he chose to pursue a law degree, in which he graduated. The legal profession was eventually a marginal activity for him, because his illness always required a secluded life, which he devoted entirely to artistic and literary creation. The fact that he stayed in his hometown to study, as he recognized on several occasions, was an opportunity to create his work. In fact, the last sixties and the first years of the nineteen-seventies, suppose the appearance of a qualified group of painters in Gipuzkoa, formally convened around the Grand Prize of Basque Painting, which at that time was awarded in San Sebastian. In this group of young painters, there are Juan Luis Goenaga, Ramón Zurriarain or the same Carlos Sanz, which make figuration a common language. As the aesthete has recognized Maya Aguiriano, who has studied this group in the spatial and temporal context, both these painters, and Vicente Ameztoy or Marta Cárdenas - although these will opt for a more pronounced realism-, they temporarily emerge in unison with other international movements, such as the French new realism.