Menchu Gal

Menchu Gal (Irún 1919–San Sebastian 2008) initially trained in Irún with Gaspar Montes Iturrioz. She won the Gipuzkoan New Artists Competition in 1932. Before turning fifteen, she moved to Paris, where she studied with the Cubist master Amédée Ozenfant. There she discovered Matisse and Fauvism.
In the early 1940s, she returned to the Spanish capital, where she was part of the so-called Madrid School. She attended classes at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts. There, she learned from masters such as Arteta and Vázquez Díaz, but the Civil War of 1936 forced her to seek refuge in France again. Menchu Gal was a prominent architect of the renewal of postwar Spanish painting and, valued and recognized in the difficult world of painting from her youth, in 1959 she became the first woman to be awarded the National Painting Prize.
The landscapes of La Mancha and her home region became her hallmark from then on, and she established herself as one of the great artists of the postwar period. Her output also included portraits and still lifes, which were featured in numerous exhibitions in museums and art centers around the world: the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1971, the Conde Duque Cultural Center in 1990, and the Cultural Center of the Villa de Madrid. She also participated in the Venice Biennale three times.
Menchu Gal was ahead of her time. In 2005, the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa awarded her the Gold Medal of Gipuzkoa, the highest distinction awarded by the regional government. Thus, the Irun painter became the first woman in the history of this medal. On that occasion, the deputy general, Joxe Juan Gonzalez de Txabarri, highlighted her free spirit, "mostly unorthodox. Independent, a precocious traveler, intellectually restless, Menchu Gal was a woman ahead of her time; linked to the most important painters, artists, and avant-garde movements of the 20th century."