The Cajasol Foundation of Seville This summer presents one of the most important exhibitions of its season, the result of the collaboration with the Student residence Madrid. Until September 7, the Velázquez Hall at the foundation's headquarters will host 'Bores, Madrid-Paris (1898-1972)', the first major retrospective of the Madrid-born artist, one of the most unique artists of Spanish contemporary art, which is considered the most identified with the generation of '27.
The opening ceremony held this Tuesday included the participation of the Chairman of the Cajasol Foundation, Antonio Pulido; the director of the Student Residence, Alicia Gómez-Navarro; and the curator of the exhibition, Genoveva Tusell.
The exhibition, which aimed to highlight the figure of the artist that coincided with the 50th anniversary of his death and which has already been shown in the capital of Spain and Granada, covers Bores' artistic career from his beginnings in Madrid in the 1920s and his mature production, already installed in France, until his death in 1972.
The interesting thing about this retrospective is that it contains the first works of an unclassifiable painter, neither purely cubist nor surrealist, in short, a unique voice within the avant-garde. One of his contemporaries, Juan Ramón Jiménez, called him one «classic of contemporary art» and this exhibition attempts to provide the reasons for that with a tour of almost a hundred works by Bores in between oil paintings, drawings and engravings, from private collections and from the funds of the Student Residence itself. In addition, there is the cooperation of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Madrid, which has loaned the work 'Pink mannequin'.
Although the artist was not a resident, his first steps were marked by the Madrid Student Residence. Bores had contact with Buñuel, Dalí, he visited literary gatherings, café theaters… These experiences from the 1920s are reflected in the exhibition through a series of drawings from the collections of the Madrid Student Residence. The exhibition features a collection of ink on paper portraits of intellectuals and artists linked to the Spanish Silver Age. That's how he became friends with Juan Ramón Jiménez, Dalí, Lorca or José Bergamín. Also on display from that period are several still lifes and nudes that occupy the first room of the two that occupy this retrospective.
This shows a series of illustrations commissioned by the most important publications of the time, such as 'Western magazine' of Ortega y Gasset, which celebrated its centenary in 2023.
Another milestone that Genoveva Tusell highlighted during her tour of the exhibition is the influence of ultraism in the work of Bores. From this pillar stands out the portrait of his friend, the poet and essayist William of Torres and a series of woodcuts, a technique introduced to him by the literary couple, Nora Borges.
Despite the good critical success that his participation in the first exhibition of the Association of Iberian Artists held in Madrid between May and June 2025, Francisco Bores did not like the applause of the audience and decided to go to Paris, where he met his friend Pancho Cossío and where they were already Picasso or Johannes Gray. The artist attended this exhibition with 16 oil paintings and watercolors, which belonged to a stage that he himself called 'renewed classicism'.
The representation of this exhibition in the Cajasol exhibition is accompanied by some other artists who coincided with Bores in the Madrid avant-garde, such as 'Two nudes' by Roberto Fernandez Balbuena or a nameless landscape of Mallorca Gabriel Garcia Maroto.