Together with Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Remedos Varo and Esteban Francés, the painter Óscar Domínguez (Tenerife, Canary Islands, 1906 - Paris, 1957) is among the constellation of names that Spanish painting contributed to the international Surrealist movement. Domínguez’s work was inspired by an iconography connected with his youth in the north of Tenerife, where he forged an irrational and superabundant concept of the enigmatic processes of metamorphosis that would accompany his work throughout his career.

After he moved to Paris in 1927 to take charge of the family businesses Domínguez joined the Surrealist group in 1934. From that point on he participated in the publications, exhibitions and collective activities organised by this Parisian group, including the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938. During the Occupation, Domínguez was involved in clandestine activities in support of the Resistance. It was then that his friendship deepened with Picasso, whom he called ‘the most sensational man of the time’ and who exercised a notable influence on his work.

A visionary painter and a remarkable creator of symbolically functioning objects, Óscar Domínguez was responsible for the invention of ‘decalcomania’. His works of the 1930s are among the highest expressions of the imagination’s drive for playfulness. In the words of the exhibition’s curator Isidro Hernández Gutiérrez, Domínguez’s painting seeks to give meaning to the exercise of creative freedom, understanding art and life as a single impulse in which chance, desire, black humour and the irrational go hand in hand.