By Rafael Canogar
Located in Surfside, FL
The Wounded One (El Herido) from Violence (La Violencia) 1969 signed, dated and titled in pencil
Dimensions: sheet: 22 1/16 x 30 1/16" (56 x 76.4cm)
Rafael Canogar ( Toledo , 1935) is a Spanish painter, one of the leading representatives of abstract art in Spain.
Disciple of Daniel Vazquez Díaz (1948-1953), in his first works he found a way to reach the avant garde and, very soon, to study abstraction deeply.
He initially used a sculpture technique: with his hands he scratched or squeezed the paste that vibrated on flat colored backgrounds. It was a painting in which the initial gesture comes directly from the heart. At this point, Canogar embodied the best of painting material .
In 1957 he founded with other artists the EI Paso group. With artists like Luis Feito, Manolo Millares, Pablo Serrano, Manuel Rivera and Antonio Saura, he begins the Spanish avant-garde movement and continues to do so until 1960. It is influenced by Action painting. They defended, between 1957 and 1960 , an informal aesthetic and the opening of Franco Spain to the international scene. Informalism was eminently the expression of freedom, of the unique and unrepeatable, carried out with a direct and spontaneous calligraphy. Works eminently intuitive and passionate, made with the urgency that time, age and theories claimed. pieta, brothers in arms.
1974 Rafael Canogar participated along with Wolf Vostell , Edward Kienholz and other artists in Berlin in the activities of ADA - Aktionen der Avantgarde.
In 1975 he abandons this realism and during a period realizes eminently abstract works, an analysis of the painting, of the support, of the bidimensionality of the painting. But Canogar needs to invent a new iconography , recover the memory and - in a tribute to the historical avant-gardes - that he realizes through the mask, the head, the face, as a representation of the man who loses his individuality and becomes a plastic sign.
In 1982 receives the Golden Ball the National Prize of Plastic Arts . There are his works in several museums of modern art: Cuenca , Madrid, Barcelona, Turin, Rome, Caracas and Pittsburgh (Carnegie Institute), etc.
In 1984 he was included in the prestigious Various Artists with Antoni Tapies, Rufino Tamayo, Robert Motherwell, José...
Category
1960s Modern Rafael Canogar Art