Exhibitions

A selection of works from the exhibition Albert Monteys: Cosmic Wonder will also be on display at various Metro Bilbao stations as part of the programme of the 17th Ja! Festival, dedicated to science fiction.

Rafael Azcona (Logroño, 1926–2008), a writer and one of Europe’s great screenwriters — whose key collaborations included directors such as Marco Ferreri, Luis García Berlanga, Carlos Saura, José Luis Cuerda, Fernando Trueba and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón — also worked as a graphic humourist early in his career. To mark the centenary of his birth, Azcona, Graphic Humourist explores this lesser-known aspect of his legacy.

The exhibition brings together around fifty cartoons published in the newspaper Pueblo between 1954 and 1956. Azcona took advantage of the openings left by Francoist censorship in the field of municipal affairs to turn everyday reality into a target for his irony. In his daily work for the newspaper, he focused on social contradictions, bureaucracy, economic hardship and the anonymous figures who would later populate his novels and screenplays.

These cartoons are therefore much more than humorous drawings: they are the notebook in which one of the most distinctive voices in Spanish literature and cinema first began to take shape.

“I’m thoroughly enjoying doing these things: tugging at the beard of severity, sadness, melancholy and stupidity is a delight.” — Rafael Azcona