In 1958, Francisco Muñoz Cabrero and Fernando Alonso Martínez founded DARRO, a Spanish furniture company for which the architects Miguel Fisac, Javier Carvajal, Fernando Ramón Moliner, José Antonio Coderch, Equipo 57 and Javier Feduchi, among others, designed.
Darro was located in a commercial premises in the Salamanca neighbourhood of Madrid which, in addition to having space to exhibit its own furniture and function as a point of sale, served as an art gallery in which different exhibitions of the style of those collected in this post were carried out. Its emblematic shop closed in 1979 and with the closure also disappeared its characteristic logo composed in stencil lettering.
As part of the Madrid Design Festival 2019 programme, an exhibition has been organised under the title “Darro. Design and Art”, curated by Pedro Feduchi in which, in addition to showing sixty relevant pieces of his furniture, you can see some of the catalogues that appear in this post.
Exhibitions with very diverse contents but with catalogues in which the only unifying feature was the square format so used in the 60s and 70s and the “Bauhausian” resource of composing texts exclusively in low boxes.
Catalogues of exhibitions with very diverse themes under titles such as “Arte actual”, “Cuatro pintores de Chile”, “Andrés Alfaro”, “El bodegón y las nuevas experiencias” or “Blanco, negro”, some of them with texts signed by the art critic José María Moreno Galván. Among the exhibitions, the one entitled “Arte sacro. Homenaje a Fra Angelico” (Homage to Fra Angelico), celebrated at Christmas 1959, in which the famous painting “Madonna de la granada” (Madonna of the Pomegranate), then owned by the Dukes of Alba and now owned by the Prado National Museum, was shown.
I would like to thank Pedro García Ramos for the loan of the material shown in the post and which forms part of his very interesting archive.
Emilio Gil