1936, Madrid, Spain
A Couple, 1965
oil on masonite board, 80 x 100 cm
Acquisition: Donated by the artist
Reference: 01357
1940, Saragoza, Spain
Diptych No. 17, 1979
Black&white photography on paper, 25,8 х 17,7 cm
Edition: 12/50; inscription: b.l. 12/50; b.r. Navarro 79
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 03082
Biography
Rafael Navarro Garralaga (born 8 October 1940 in Zaragoza) is a Spanish art photographer. Navarro’s interest in photography began in the 1970s, starting his career on theatre and sports photography. But finally, he became very fond of visual arts where he started to develop a more personal language.
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Entire entry is at wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Navarro_(photographer)
1935, Toledo, Spain
Crowd (El Tumulto), 1966
Oil on canvas, 197 х 150 cm
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 01855
Biography
He was born in Toledo and studied in Madrid, where in 1957 he was a founder member of the group El Paso, which was hostile to the Franco regime. His work at this time had developed from Social Realism to aggressively expressive abstraction, but in the 1960s he reintroduced representational elements, with overtones of humor and satire, through which he expressed human alienation in the modern world: ‘The protagonist of my work, man, is a clear denunciation of industrial society, which enslaves our urban existence and reduces the human being to pure functionalism, incapable of the most elementary co-existence and brotherhood.’ Canogar has travelled and exhibited widely and is regarded as one of the leading Spanish painters of his generation. In 1971 he won the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Bienal.
source: Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art (1999)
1881, Malaga, Spain – 1973, Mougins, France
Woman’s Head, 1963
Oil on canvas, 73 х 55 cm
Acquisition: Gift by the artist
Reference: 00571
The donation was a personal choice by the artist obtained in 1965 through the cooperation of Mr. Jean Cassou, former director of the Paris National Museum of Modern Art from the Louis Leiris Gallery as а representative of his work. Head of a Woman oil on canvas, 73 x 54, was painted in one of the artist’s last studios. It was part of a series of portraits of women, his favorite motif that had initially appeared in 1932 with cubist distortions typical for his late period.
On 17 November, 1971 the painting was stolen from the permanent exhibition. At the same time several of his paintings were also stolen from some galleries in Paris. The painting was returned on 21 April, 1972. It was represented in several museum exhibitions, and in 1994 it was included, in ironical manner, in the multimedia installation The Superstitious Man by the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov.
Biography
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
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Entire article is available on: wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso
1926, Las Palmas, Spain – 1972, Madrid, Spain
Wounded in Peace, 1964/1965
Mixed media on canvas, 101 x 82 cm
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 01664
Biography
Self-taught as an artist, Millares was introduced to Surrealism in 1948. In 1953, he moved to Madrid and became an abstract painter. In 1957, Millares along with other artists founded the avant-garde group El Paso (The Step) in Madrid. The members of El Paso at the time of signing the manifesto and in their first exhibitions as a group were the painters Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Suárez, Antonio Saura and the sculptor Pablo Serrano. After showing his work in San Pablo in 1957, Millares’ work was introduced to the United States in 1958.[2] He attained an international reputation by the early 1960s, and had a solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1961.
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Entire biography is available at: wikipedia.org/wiki/Manolo_Millares
1935, Barcelona, Spain
Crowd and Object, 1969
Offset lithography, 42,5 х 53 cm
Edition: 21/70; inscriptions: b.l. 21/70, b.m. Foul et objet, b.r. Rabascall 69
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 01862
Biography
Joan Rabascall (Barcelona, 1935) studied at the Escola Superior d’Arts Decoratives Massana, Barcelona, and at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris, where he has lived and worked since 1962. In the sixties, he was in contact with the critics Lawrence Alloway and Pierre Restany, and with the Independent Group in England and the Noveaux Réalistes in France, both of which strove to recover techniques of representation as well as aesthetic and ethical positions close to Berlin Dada. He collaborated in the ‘ceremonial actions’ organised in 1969 and 1970 by the group of Catalan artists based in Paris, and which included Miralda, Benet Rossell and Jaume Xifra. Although initially working with collage, he soon incorporated photomontage and assemblages of images and objects into installations and photographic series. In his work, Rabascall critiques the mediated image and the lifestyle imposed by the media. Using iconography and texts from the mass media, he highlights their implicit manipulation. One of the most recurring elements in his work is the medium of television approached from multiple perspectives: as an icon, object, souvenir, sculpture, element of communication and fetish. He has often worked on series or groups of works with a common subject. In the eighties, he began a conceptual reflection on painting and, later, on the concept of landscape and its role in the new ecological paradigm. Overall, Rabascall’s work takes a critical look at the everyday mythologies of the present. He participated in the biennales of Paris (1965 and 1969) and Venice (1972 and 1976). Although he has exhibited regularly in France from the 1970s, apart from inclusion in some exhibitions such as Spain is Different in 1976 at the G gallery, Barcelona, it was not until 1985 that he began exhibiting in Catalonia, when he participated in Paris-Barcelona-New York at the Palau Robert, Barcelona, and in projects presented at La Virreina (1993) and the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (2000). Rabascall has exhibited in Paris (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994, 1996 and 2001, and Grand Palais, 2006); New York (Thread Waxing Space, 1994); Tokyo (Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996 and Metropolitan Art Museum, 2000); Madrid (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2005 and 2006); and Bremen (Neues Museum Wesserburg, 2002), among others. In 2009, MACBA held a retrospective focused on the years 1960–80. His work is in collections such as the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Bogotá; the National Libraries of Paris and Madrid; National Museum, Warsaw; and MACBA, Barcelona.
Source: MACBA, Barcelona: www.macba.cat/en/actor/joan-rabascall-4d07/
1913, Barcelona, Spain – 2005, St. Tropez, France
Embroidering Sheet, 1968
Mixed media on paper, 78 x 58,5 cm
Edition: 67/80; inscription: b.l.: 67/80; b.r.: Clavé; on the back side: Clavé “La nappe brodée”
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 01702
Biography
Antoni Clavé (5 April 1913 – 1 September 2005) was a Catalan master painter, printmaker, sculptor, stage designer and costume designer. He was nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design) for his work on the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen. Clavé was one of Spain’s best known and most celebrated artists. His work evolved from a baroque, ornamental style to a pure, minimal aesthetic. In his later years, his work is completely abstract, employing expressive lines and exploring the boundaries of collage, objet trove, shading, texture and color. He was trained at the School of Fine Arts, Barcelona, where he was taught by Angel Ferrant and Felix Mestres. With his works being influenced by artists such as Bonnard, Vuillard and Roualt. He is best known for his lyrical abstractions, works which combine paint with collage.
The biography is from Wikipedia under the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License
Entire entry: wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Clav%C3%A9
1930, Aldeanueva, Spain – 2007, Sion, Switzerland
V – 7, 1963
Engraving on glass, 46 x 46 cm
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 00257
