The Foundation

The Enrique Gran Foundation is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is the conservation, study, public exhibition and dissemination of the memory and work of the painter Enrique Gran.

The Foundation began its activities, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the death of this master of abstraction, with El Año Gran (The Gran Year), an ambitious project and a highlight of the 2009 cultural calendar, which began in Cádiz and culminated in Santander with a monument in his memory, following an intense programme coordinated and curated by Begoña Merino Gran, the painter’s grandniece and president of the Enrique Gran Foundation.

After his sudden and tragic death in 1999, Begoña Merino took on the project that Gran left unfinished: the presentation of his unpublished and most intimate work. For the first time, she brought the viewer closer to the entire ‘creative universe’ of one of the most outstanding and personal careers in 20th-century Spanish painting.

This extraordinary experience, together with the need to keep his legacy alive, are the origin and spirit of the Enrique Gran Foundation, an organisation that, since its inception, has maintained the avant-garde and quality in each of its projects as its guiding principle, fulfilling its founding objective of disseminating the enormous legacy of Enrique Gran, whose work is essential for understanding abstraction in our country.