Raquel Forner was born on April 22, 1902, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into the family of Manuel Forner and Josefa Escudero. As a result of frequent family travel to Europe Forner spent part of her childhood in Spain, and later developed an artistic interest in the Spanish Civil War.
Raquel graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts as a teacher of drawing in 1922.
Forner had started her career as a plastic artist in the sphere of boiling and reconstruction in the early years of the interwar period. She also actively worked on the field of visual arts in Buenos Aires, which was going through a process of increasing consolidation at the same time as she began to experience the tensions caused by the impact of modernity and the emergence of "new art." The trip to Europe was, within this process, a necessary instance for young artists. Forner was not an exception: she traveled to Spain, Italy and Morocco, France, and especifically Paris was her place of settlement during 1929 - 1931.
Upon her return in 1931, she found in Buenos Aires an environment of affirmation of the space for the arts and within it a site for the "new art" that was necessary to continue building. In the twenties and advancing on the thirties, there were added the exhibitions of Argentinian and foreign artists representing the new trends. Buenos Aires had become, in a few years, a fruitful battlefield between what was recognized as the consecrated aesthetic - that of a nineteenth-century naturalism inheriting Impressionism and Spanish regional painting - and the new plastic proposals signed-beyond of its variations.
On the other hand, in the thirties, the national and international reality that was flooding the panorama of artists and intellectuals, also invaded the mental horizon of Raquel Forner: the civil war and the Second World War forces her to observe the chaotic landscape of the world and operate a turn towards commitment to the present. She identified with the struggles that the Popular Front embodied and gave a new direction to her work by constructing a powerfully expressive iconography centered on the image of women as protagonists. The dramatic sense dyes her work in these years. In 1937 she began her "Series of Spain", in 1939 that of the "Drama", which would have been continued until 1946, the year in which the series "Las Roces" was begun.
"The Series of Spain" and "The drama" are traversed by the pathetic installed in a tragic and violent landscape that tears the characters. In Forner's works of the thirties and forties, color gave way to the contrasts of values and the dramatic intensity lied in the production of landscapes and harrowing figures. "The drama" was presented as a synthesis of several other pieces that made up the saga of contemporary human pain. A series of preliminary, simple and monumental drawings gave way to that complex work overpopulated with characters and elements.
During the 1940s through most of the 1950s she produced several series on similar tragic themes in a primarily expressionist mode. Forner often portrayed strong female figures, but not as specific explorations into gender norms. Beginning in 1957, coinciding with the space race, Forner's attention turned to imagined scenes of interplanetary travel. With her "Space Series", which exhibited in Europe and earned recognition, she became one of the earliest fine artists to portray scenes of outer space. Forner's artistic portrayals of space travel continued until the 1970s. The United States National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution in Washington has several examples of her late period work in its collection including "Return of the Astronaut", created in 1969. Forner died in Buenos Aires in 1988. That year, the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art organized a retrospective in her honor.
Raquel borrowed ideas from surrealism during the 1940s, adapting its esthetic of distortion without seeking to reproduce a dream state.
Quotations: "I need my painting to be a dramatic echo of the moment I live."
In 1936 Raquel married Alfredo Bigatti, whom she had met in Buenos Aires and frequented in Europe.
