Las Meninas - front view

by World Reflections By Sharon

Title

Las Meninas - front view

Artist

World Reflections By Sharon

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

This photograph was taken in 2006.

"Painter and sculptor Manolo Valdés was born on March 8, 1942, in Valencia, Spain. In 1948 he attended the local Dominican school, and in 1957 he enrolled in the fine-arts school of San Carlos, Valencia, leaving after only two years to devote his life entirely to painting. In 1962 he had his first solo exhibition at the Nebli Gallery in Madrid and in 1964, along with Jean A. Toledo and Rafael Solbes, he formed the Equipo Cronica. The group’s work combined elements of English and American Pop Art with the figurative aestheticism of the 1960s Nueva Figuraciòn movement, and took a critical stance toward Spanish politics and art history. The group fostered self-criticism and sought inspiration from other artists’ work, especially that of the great masters like Pablo Picasso and Diego Velásquez.

Though Toledo left the group in 1965, Valdés and Solbes continued to collaborate, and in that same year the first show of the Equipo Cronica took place in Reggio Emilia. After that, they took part in many other exhibitions, such as Kunst und Politik in Karlsruhe, Wuppertal, and Cologne in 1970. The group dissolved upon the death of Solbes in 1981, but Valdés persevered, continuing to use images associated with specific historical and artistic movements but choosing not to infuse them with political implications, as he had done in his previous work.

In 1991 he showed at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, and in 1995 he had his first solo exhibition in Italy at the gallery Il Gabbiano in Rome. In 1999, along with Carles Santos and Esther Ferren, he was invited to represent Spain at the Venice Biennale. In 2002 the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, presented a retrospective of his work. Valdés’s artistic practice can be seen, on the one hand, as one that explores the specific qualities of painting. On the other hand, it reveals the meticulous job of ‘taking’ elements from other artists’ pieces; that is to say, by examining details of such masters as Matisse, Manet, Goya, and Picasso, he has developed an individual style that reviews history without detracting from the original subject. Valdés, who practiced also sculpture, currently lives and works in New York." from Peggy Guggenheim Collection web site

Uploaded

August 26th, 2021

Statistics

Viewed 127 Times  -  Last Visitor from New York, NY on 04/25/2024 at 9:10 PM

Colors

Embed

Share

Sales Sheet

Tags