The Postal Union of the Americas, Spain and Portugal (UPAEP) is an international intergovernmental organization, founded in 1911 in Montevideo, formed by the governments of 28 member countries and whose main purpose is to promote technical cooperation among the postal operators of the member countries.
Since 1989, UPAEP member countries have issued a common stamp each year, with a specific motif or theme. This year, the theme chosen for the series is Art.
The stamp that Correos dedicates to it this year is a composition made up of previously issued art stamps. This new issue becomes a postal collage, making art out of art.
The collage is defined as the pictorial technique that consists of combining different external elements on a support. Normally, cuttings, photographs or papers. In this case the support is the stamp and in it appear different cuttings of other stamps dedicated to art together with cuttings of colored papers creating different planes.
The fragments or cuttings of block sheets that make up this stamp are the issues:
- Spain-Austria Joint Issue of 2009. The block sheet consists of two stamps that reproduce a solo portrait of the Infanta Margarita Teresa with blue dress (upper part) and another of the same Infanta included among the group of belonging to the popular work of Velázquez, Las Meninas (lower part).
- The one issued in 2016 with the work of Jaume Plensa showing the sculpture "Echo" which in 2011 was exhibited in Madison Square Park in New York.
- The one dedicated to Eduardo Arroyo in 2018 collects one of the author's works, within his artistic series entitled Parmi les peintres .
- In 2014 the commemorative sheet of the IV centenary of the death of El Greco, being the first time in the history of Correos that a stamp is made with gold plating on a silver base of 999 thousandths.
The last of the stamps reproduces next to the title of the exhibition for which it was issued, "The first Picasso. A Coruña 2015", the work of the Andalusian painter entitled "Evocative Self-Portrait", in which Picasso draws himself in 1945 as if he were a child.
