Enrique Climent Art

Enrique Climent was a Spanish painter and graphic designer, who was present in the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition of Paris in 1937, and two of whose works are conserved in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, as part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, Spain. He was exiled in Mexico, the country in which he died at 83. He has been associated with the driving group in Spain of the "New Art". Born in a bourgeois family of the Valencian capital, despite paternal opposition, Climent studied at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, and with a scholarship received in 1919, he traveled to Madrid to complete them in San Fernando. In the capital of Spain, he participated in the gathering of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, for whom he illustrated some greguerías, and in the avant-garde activities of the then-called first Escuela de Vallecas, associated with the Society of Iberian Artists. He also collaborated as an illustrator of Blanco y Negro magazine and illustrated books by Elena Fortún, Azorín, Juan Manuel Díaz Caneja and Manuel Abril. In 1924, he had been to Paris and stayed there for two years, where he came to design some stage sets for opera shows. He participated in three of the exhibitions of "Los Ibéricos" (San Sebastián in 1931, Copenhagen in 1932 and Berlin in 1933) as well as in the International Exhibitions of Contemporary Spanish Art in Paris and Venice in 1936. He was one of the Spanish exiles who in 1939 landed in Veracruz, after the crossing of the Sinaia, along with other intellectuals and artists (such as José Moreno Villa, Arturo Souto or Remedios Varo. In Mexico, Climent approached his avant-garde style to the realistic tendencies of the decade of 1940 but without agreeing with the pictorial ideology of Mexican muralism. From 1964, he alternated his Mexican residence with stays in Altea (Alicante). He died in Mexico in 1980. Four years after his death, the Palace of Fine Arts of Mexico dedicated a monographic exhibition to him. In Spain, it was rediscovered following the exhibition of drawings by exiled Spanish artists, gathered by Javier Tusell, as the protagonist of that exodus. From his Mexican period, mostly kept in the collection of his daughter, Isabel Climent and other private collections is the portrait of Juan Gil-Albert (1940) preserved in the Provincial Council of Alicante.