Rafael Ruiz Balerdi

Rafael Ruiz Balerdi is one of the relevant artists who shaped the Spanish post-war avant-garde. A great draughtsman and extraordinary colorist, his work covered various aesthetic options until it led to the informalism of gesture. This consisted in the search for a form that was built on the gestural features with successive and sometimes exhausting interventions, which in some works managed to reach an almost extreme place of crumbling. The theoretical basis of his work is found in certain aspects of Hindu thought; around the idea of a yoga of action preached by the philosopher Aurobindo, an idea that came from the ancient text of the Bhagavad Gita, which opposed the contemplative and ahistorical yoga, and that Balerdi believed to embody in the very exercise of painting.

Rafael Ruiz Balerdi (Donostia-San Sebastián, 1934 - Altea, Alicante, 1992) studied at the San Sebastián School of Arts and Crafts, the San Fernando School of Fine Arts and the Círculo de Bellas Artes, both in Madrid. He took part in the creation of the Gaur group together with the Gipuzkoan artists Amabale Arias, Néstor Basterrechea,Eduardo Chillida, Remigio Mendiburu, Jorge Oteiza, José Antonio Sistiaga and José Luis Zumeta. Its launch represented a structural break with the cultural dynamics of the time and awakened the role of the artist and art as active subjects in the processes of collective construction. His work has been the subject of various retrospectives in museums such as the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián, and the Exhibition Halls of the Ministry of Culture in the National Library of Spain.