'80. Painting and graphic art in Spain', a visual journey through 63 pieces by the 42 most relevant artists of a period of creative explosion that would set the reference throughout the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decades of this 21st century. This outstanding proposal is made possible thanks to the donation of the Collection of original graphic art that Emilio Pi and Helena Fernandino made to the Pamplona City Council last July - of which 43 pieces are presented - and the collaboration of Jaime Sordo, who has lent a set of 20 paintings from his Bragales collection. This is a travelling exhibition in two spaces: the Sala de Armas of the Citadel of Pamplona, ​​Navarra and the Sala Mauro Murieras in Torrelavega, Cantabria.

'80 Painting and Graphic Art in Spain' offers a panoramic tour through the work of 42 leading authors of this creative moment, from all over Spain and belonging to several generations, most of them born in the 1940s and 1950s, with the oldest being the deceased Catalans Tàpies and Rafòls-Casamada, born in 1923, and the youngest being the Galician Antón Patiño and the Majorcan Miquel Barceló, born in 1957. All of them are exponents of the recent history of Spanish art, as evidenced by the presence among them of 18 national plastic arts awards, an award established precisely in 1980.

A good visual coexistence between the Pi-Fernandino Legacy and the 'Bragales Collection'
The exhibition offers a very visual journey, a puzzle of images made up of the pieces arranged for this setting in the Sala de Armas in Ciudadela: the paintings from the Los Bragales Collection and the original graphic works from the Pi-Fernandino Legacy donated to the Pamplona City Council's Contemporary Art Collection. Their coexistence allows us to discover and establish divergences and connections between these two creative languages ​​and their own material and technical characteristics, from the large formats of oils, acrylics and other mixed techniques on canvas to engravings on paper, the result of the alchemy of burins, acids, lithographic stones, silkscreens, inks and resins printed under the printer's press.
The exhibition is a retrospective of the plastic art of the 1980s in Spain, a period that has been called in different current reviews as the years of "enthusiasm", fostered by a political context of democratic eagerness, of openness to the world, ratified with the signing, in 1985, of the Treaty of Accession to the European Union and, above all, by a context of economic euphoria that began in this decade of the 1980s and that would suffer its "crash" with the crisis of 2008. All these circumstances had a multiplying effect in the artistic field, giving rise to an unusual development that favored the growth of a contemporary art market in Spain, the emergence of a "cultural industry" that was manifested in all its agents, from artists to galleries, together with a greater appreciation and knowledge on the part of the public towards the most current artistic manifestations.

The first opportunity to enjoy the collection donated to the City Council in June
The Pi Fernandino collection, a benchmark for national and international contemporary art collecting, donated 156 works to Pamplona City Council last June, which have since become part of the City Council's Contemporary Art Collection. This is a private collection made up of works acquired since the 1990s by the business couple from Pamplona living in Madrid, Emilio Pi and Helena Fernandino, which has become a benchmark for private national and international collecting. Their video art collection, partly donated to the Museo Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, was recognised in 2010 with the ARCO award for the best Spanish collection.
According to municipal reports, the collection has, among its areas of specialisation, a significant collection of graphic works by the most prominent artists of the Spanish scene of the 1990s, as well as a series of small-format special editions by very significant authors of this same context. These creations cover the period between 1983 and 2007, although most of them belong to the 1990s. That decade marked the consecration of Spanish graphic work on the international scene, both due to the renown obtained by its creators, and the interest aroused in its commercialisation.