Benjamín Palencia

Benjamín Palencia Pérez (Barrax, Albacete, 1894-Madrid, 1980) was a Spanish painter and illustrator, and founder of the Vallecas School together with the sculptor Alberto Sánchez. His large body of work focuses on the poetry of the Castilian landscape, which he simplified using features of Cubism after an early phase close to Surrealism. He is one of the key figures of Spanish avant-garde painting in the twentieth century.

Born into a humble family, he moved to Madrid around 1909. There he received support from the engineer Rafael Gómez Egóñez, his tutor for many years, and copied Velázquez and El Greco at the Prado. At the Residencia de Estudiantes he met Bores and Dalí. Around 1929 he launched the first Vallecas School with Alberto Sánchez, and in 1932 he worked with Federico García Lorca's La Barraca, where he designed the sets and costumes for Calderón's "La vida es sueño".

After the Civil War he turned to an austere realism and gathered younger painters in El Convivio, the origin of the second Vallecas School and a precursor of the Madrid School. He received the First Medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1943 and the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts in 1978. His legacy remains part of the memory of twentieth-century Spanish painting, and he bequeathed much of his work to the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo.