Valdés, Manolo.
Works of the artist.
Manolo Valdés was born on March 8th, 1942, in the city of Valencia. In 1957 he entered the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos, yet dropped out two years later to focus solely on his painting. [+]
Valdés, Manolo
Manolo Valdés was born on March 8th, 1942, in the city of Valencia. In 1957 he entered the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos, yet dropped out two years later to focus solely on his painting.
Shortly after leaving school, Valdés was already demonstrating a technical ability and creativity that was out of the ordinary, for someone with so little artistic training.
In the early sixties, Valdés, together with the artists Gorris, Juan Antonio Toledo, Rafael Solbes, and the art historian Tomás Llorens, formed the group Estampa Popular de Valencia. This group advocated for a new role of art and the artist in the context of Spain's historical and social transformation. For them, new artistic expressions, shouldn't only echo the socioeconomic situation, but also take into consideration the language and visual resources of mass media.
In 1964 Manolo Valdés, Rafael Solbes and Juan Antonio Toledo split from Estampa Popular and formed the group Equipo Crónica. A year later Toledo abandoned the project. Equipo Crónica, influenced by the debates generated within Estampa Popular, emerged as a critique of individualism and the romantic image of the genius artist. Hence the idea of dissolving the personality of the artists under a collective and, at the same time, anonymous name.
In 1981 Rafael Solbes died. From then on, Manolo Valdés set out on his own. His first exhibition was at the Maeght Gallery in Barcelona in 1982. He presented a group of paintings and sculptures transforming famous paintings, such as the one of Portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria by Velázquez, using different avant-garde languages. In a line similar to that of Equipo Crónica, this mixture of disparate motifs and styles gave rise to a transmuted Mariana, a Mariana who, in the manner of Picasso, Kandinski or Miró, went beyond the historicist references to become a tribute to the artistic endeavor itself.
Throughout the eighties, Valdés incorporated a new sense of pictorial methods that progressively distanced him from his period in Equipo Crónica. Although he continued to be inspired by the great art historical works, the narrative or the taste for irony and the anecdotal were disappearing in pursuit of an increasingly dense and essential painting.
Through this reencounter with texture and matter, and without ever departing from figuration, his works technically approached those of informalist painters such as Millares, Tàpies, Burri or Dubuffet. Likewise, in those same years, sculpture began to play an increasingly important role in his production. Although wood became the material that he worked with the most, he did not shy away from exploring the tactile and formal qualities of lead, zinc, granite, alabaster, etc.
In 1989, in search of new creative stimuli, he moved with his family to New York, where he has continued to live and work ever since. Throughout the nineties, Valdés continued with this line of work based on the assimilation and reelaboration of objects and works of art.
Between October 2002 and January 2003, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao dedicated him the most significant retrospective of his career. The exhibition, curated by Kosme de Barañano, showcased his most impressive paintings and sculptures from the last twenty years. While Arco '03 fair presented in February his new series Horta de Ebro.
