Amalia Avia

Santa Cruz de la Zarza, Toledo, 1930 - Madrid, 2011

Amalia Avia was a successful painter. She produced realist works and was particularly keen to represent urban spaces from old Madrid, in an impressive array of ochre tones, outside, in front of doors and façades. Behind close doors is, however, the title of her memoirs, published seven years before she passed away. In her memoirs, she reflects on life and art. Her prose shows an artist of great character, strong-willed and persevering, sure of her vocation and certain that she could not turn her back away on it.

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[…] the moment I set foot into his studio was so decisive that my life can be divided into before and after Peña.

Unofficial learning spaces, like the Peña Academy, played a key role in the development of artistic female authorship in Madrid in the mid-20th century. Amalia Avia starts studying in Peña at the beginning of the 1950s. There she learns about the strength and certainty of her artistic vocation. It is epiphanic. She acknowledges her compromise with art, a commitment wanted for a very long time to lead a happy and fulfilled life.

[…] facing the easel, all that matters is the persistent, often desperate, struggle with a painting that refuses to take form because, essentially, paintings never come out right. It’s through this struggle, that you eventually finish […]

Having found a sort of room of her own in front of the easel the time comes to start building a network with other female painters of the same generation. With some of them Amalia Avia opens a studio in Béjar Street. There her palette will gain finesse and her determination to persevere in the fight to create art will become stronger and manifest itself in her softly nuanced use of colours that has made her famous and that perhaps, she things although she is not sure, has to do with not wishing to possess the image. Possession of reality is not what her art is about, and she trades it, via colour, for the respect with which she faithfully reflects a historical, profound and eternal Madrid.

The journey continues: the paintings come and go. Just like they did twenty-five years ago.

The challenge of marriage and motherhood finally comes. Avia recognises how difficult it is to go against traditional gender expectations, but she also knows it is absolutely necessary. She does not like domestic work and considers it must be shared by husband and wife. She always had a studio and she always worked. Postponing her vocation was not something she wanted to do and, although necessary when her boys were little, she always knew (like her husband did) that her art was waiting. And to it she went back, not to ever leave it.