Augusto Torres at Sala Parés, Barcelona: The Son Who Took Constructivism Home

Being the son of a famous painter is a mixed blessing. Augusto Torres grew up surrounded by the giants of modern art, trained under the eye of his father, Joaquín Torres-García, and then spent decades carrying forward a school that bore his father’s name. The Augusto Torres retrospective at Sala Parés, Barcelona, opening on 21 November 2026, makes the case that he was far more than an heir. Covering every stage of his career and including, according to the gallery, many works never exhibited before, it brings the painter back to the city where he died — and to the region where he was born.

A childhood among the avant-garde

Torres was born in Terrassa, near Barcelona, on 19 June 1913, the second son of Joaquín Torres-García and Manolita Piña. His was a wandering childhood: between 1919 and 1926 the family lived in New York, Italy and the south of France before settling in Paris. There the teenager absorbed the city’s most radical circles. Jean Hélion introduced him to African sculpture; he met Theo van Doesburg, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian and Gino Severini. In 1928, aged only fifteen, he was commissioned by the Musée du Trocadéro to draw and catalogue its Inca and Nazca ceramics — the beginning of a lifelong fascination with Andean cultures. By 1930 he was working alongside the sculptor Juli González, had met Picasso and held his first exhibition.

Then, in 1933, a detour that says a lot about his temperament: he went to Madrid to copy Velázquez, Goya and El Greco at the Prado. Few young Constructivists bothered with the old masters. Torres would spend the rest of his life reconciling the grid with the lessons of painting’s past.

Montevideo and “the Catalan”

In 1934 the family moved to Montevideo, and the move reshaped everything. Torres joined the Asociación de Arte Constructivo in 1935 and the Taller Torres-García in 1942, the workshop through which his father spread his doctrine of Constructive Universalism — a structured pictorial language combining a geometric framework with simple symbols. In Uruguay, the gallery notes, he became known simply as “the Catalan”. He belonged to the generation formed in the Taller alongside Julio Alpuy, Gonzalo Fonseca, José Gurvich and Francisco Matto, and after his father’s death in 1949 he led the workshop until it closed in 1965.

Those were productive decades. In the 1950s he exhibited frequently in Europe and painted murals in collaboration with the Catalan architect Antoni Bonet, the last of them in Barcelona; other murals were made for the Liceo Héctor Miranda and the Medical Union in Montevideo. A major solo show in New York followed in 1960, and his work was seen in Montevideo, Moscow, Rome and Buenos Aires. From 1973 he lived between Barcelona and Montevideo, showing at Galeria Dau al Set in 1975; a retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art came in 1987. He died in Barcelona on 13 March 1992.

What the retrospective explores

The exhibition traces his personal synthesis of Constructivism and what the gallery calls metaphysical figuration. That tension is the key to his work. On one side is the rigorous, fully Constructivist painting he produced in Montevideo, with its compartmentalised surfaces and muted earth tones; on the other, the European education — the Prado copies, the Parisian encounters — that he never abandoned. Over time, his work moved towards a more expressive and introspective register, away from strict doctrine. Seeing many unexhibited works alongside better-known ones should make it possible to follow that evolution closely.

Sala Parés: father, then son

Founded in 1877 on Carrer de Petritxol in the Gothic Quarter, Sala Parés is one of the oldest galleries in Europe and a cornerstone of Catalan modern art history. In late 2024 and early 2025 it staged “Torres-García. Entre el Noucentisme i les avantguardes (1891–1934)”, devoted to the father’s European years. The Augusto Torres retrospective reads as a natural sequel — the story of what happened after 1934, told through the son who took the family’s Constructivism to South America and eventually brought it back.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, the Taller Torres-García is one of the most significant chapters in Latin American modernism, and its members have long been studied alongside their teacher. A retrospective of the workshop’s leader after 1949, with fresh material, offers a chance to look at the circle through a different lens.

For painters interested in abstraction, Torres shows how a strict system can stay alive. He built his pictures on a geometric scaffold yet never stopped looking at Velázquez and pre-Columbian ceramics — a reminder that structure and tradition can feed each other rather than compete.

Visiting information

Sala Parés, Carrer de Petritxol 5, 08002 Barcelona. 21 November 2026 – 16 January 2027; opening Saturday 21 November, 12:00–14:00. City guides list hours as Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–14:00 and 16:00–20:00 (confirm with the gallery). Tel. +34 93 318 70 20. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our Augusto Torres Barcelona listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.