Agustín Redondela was one of the most representative and original landscape artists of the generation that came of age after the Spanish Civil War. His work represents a very particular conception and a personalised, refreshing language in postwar landscape painting. Son of the painter and set designer José González "Redondela", from whom he received his early artistic training while helping him to create stage sets, he attended the Madrid School of Arts and Crafts for four years. There he came into contact with the artists of the Madrid School, who shared his passion for landscapes but differed from him in temperament, training and ideas. Redondela frequently travelled through Spain with them, taking notes which he would later, back at the studio, transform into elegant, harmonious paintings of progressively muted colours and schematic planes. He became a more visible presence in domestic and international circles in the 1950s, when he received the National Painting Prize (1953), participated in the biennials of Alexandria, São Paulo and Venice and the Hispano-American Art Biennials, and received a grant from the Philadelphia-based Catherwood Foundation to travel to the United States in 1954.

During the 1950s, Redondela's painting embraced a peculiar style of Expressionism manifested in a Fauvist intensification of colour. In Barcas en pequeño puerto. Bermeo [Boats in a Small Port: Bermeo] and Bermeo, forms are disintegrated and reassembled in markedly geometric lines and structures, while the painter also applied colours in heavy impasto and experimented with different textures. Starting in the 1960s, Redondela paid special attention to the figure and employed a flatter, more angular and more schematic neo-figurative style. His work was gradually stripped of all superfluous elements, even colour contrasts, and ornament disappeared altogether. This is exemplified by Paisaje de Castilla [Castile Landscape] and Tordesillas, two works with very muted colours and an Italianising syncretism that recalls the painting of Carlo Carrá. Other works, like Puerto de Bilbao [Port of Bilbao], present a highly innovative vision based on fragmented forms, a very flat space and a constructive sense verging on abstraction. In the intervening years Redondela had fully perfected the unmistakeable language and style illustrated in his landscape of Segovia, a work that reveals his artistic maturity. While building and shaping his pictorial vocabulary, throughout his life the artist carried on the family business, creating naturalistic set designs for various theatrical productions. [Genoveva Tusell García]