Óscar Domínguez

San Cristóbal de la Laguna (Spain), 1906 – Paris (France), 1957

Óscar Domínguez was a Canarian surrealist painter who belonged to the Generation of ’27. He was one of the most important Spanish artists of this genre and came into contact and interacted with great painters of this movement. His work captured an eclectic surrealism, almost naturalistic in basis and, in the noblest sense of the word, academic.

In 1927 he moves to Paris to deal with the family business, where he will remain until his death apart from short stays in Spain. After his father’s death in 1931 Óscar Domínguez starts taking his painting more seriously and works as an advertisement designer, where he will become instrumental in the dissemination of the surrealist postulates.

In 1933 he exhibits for the first time in the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife, displaying a heavy presence of surrealism. He then meets Breton, following his advice to produce smaller formats and facilitating the arrival of the surrealist group led by Breton, Jaqueline Lamba, and Benjamin Péret to Tenerife in 1935. In that same year, Domínguez exhibits in the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo in Tenerife next to artists like Chirico, Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Miró, Picasso, and Giacometti, among others. In 1936 he makes the “Decalcomanías”, which push him into notoriety, and in 1938-1939 he starts his “cosmic period”, which is where he fully evolves into his artistic capabilities.

When the Spanish civil war starts he returns to Paris and produces his “Litocronic Surfaces”. In the 1940s, influenced by the work of De Chirico and his friend Picasso, he draws surrealist images with a cubist configuration which leads to his “schematic period”. In 1948 he does his first solo exhibition in the Gallery Carré. In 1952, Domínguez’s financial troubles start to reflect into his work where his search for synthesis becomes apparent. In 1955 he will be consecrated with a retrospective in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but it will be too late for the artist, who commits suicide in Paris the 31st of December of 1957.