20/06/202513/10/2025
Óscar Domínguez
Oscar Domínguez (1906-1957). Personajes surrealistas, 1937. Colección particular © Gasull Fotografía © Óscar Domínguez, VEGAP, Málaga, 2025
Together with Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, and with Remedios Varo and Esteban Francés, the painter Óscar Domínguez (Tenerife, Canary Islands, 1906 – Paris, 1957) belongs to the constellation of names that Spanish painting contributed to the international Surrealist movement. His work draws on an iconography linked to his youth spent in the north of Tenerife, where he developed an irrational and overabundant conception of the enigmatic processes of metamorphosis that would be reflected in his work throughout his career.
Óscar Domínguez moved to Paris in 1927 to take charge of the family business and joined the Surrealist group in 1934. From then on he was involved in the publications, exhibitions and collective activities organised by the Paris-based group, such as the International Surrealist Exhibition (1938). During the Occupation he took part in clandestine activities in support of the Resistance. It was then that he forged a firm friendship with Picasso, whom he called ‘the most sensational man of the era’, and who had a notable influence on his work.
A visionary painter and magnificent creator of objects with symbolic functions, Óscar Domínguez was the inventor of decalcomania. His creations from the 1930s are one of the highest expressions of the playful impulse of the imagination.
Curatorship: Isidro Hernández Gutiérrez
With a PhD from the University of La Laguna, he is chief curator of the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes collection. He has curated several exhibitions on Óscar Domínguez and his period and context. Together with Ana Vázquez de Parga, in 2006 he coordinated Éxodo hacia el sur: Óscar Domínguez y el automatismo absoluto. He took part with the Musée Cantini (Marseille) in the retrospective devoted to the artist in 2005. He has curated the exhibitions Óscar Domínguez: una existencia de papel (2011); Óscar Domínguez entre el mito y el sueño (2014–2016); together with Pavel Stepanek, Óscar Domínguez en Checoslovaquia, 1946–1949 (2017); and Óscar Domínguez: la conquista del mundo por la imagen (2023). As a writer, in 2007 he received the Emilio Prados prize awarded by the Centro Cultural de la Generación del 27 in the city of Málaga.
