Guillermo Martin Bermejo’s drawings reference old paintings and literature in the creation of a very personalised romantic world. Drawn in pencil on pages from second hand notebooks, his works are both charming and deceptively naive. They present sylised portraits of figures from history, compositions in bucolic surroundings, or subtly altered sections of renowned artworks, and use the past as a poetic space into which to place the artist’s own life experiences and memories as if they were part of a long-lost legend or a chanson de geste. In some ways reminiscent of Stanley Spencer in their theatrical interpretation of the everyday, his images take place in environments that feel both dramatic and parochial. It is the past as a gentle intimate world, full of intense feeling.
Guillermo Martin Bermejo is a Spanish artist based in a small village near Madrid. His most recent solo exhibition, ‘La Pleyade de la Espana Moderna’, was held at Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid in 2019 – 2020. He has also exhibited at the Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid (2018); Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (2017); and the Fundación Santiago y Segundo Montes, Valladolid (2016). His works appear in a number of notable collections, including Colección Caja Madrid, Colección Caja España (Valladolid), Biblioteca Francisco Javier Martin Abril (Valladolid), Marine International Bureau (Mónaco), and the Spanish Embassy in Tokyo, Japan.