MANUEL ÁNGELES ORTIZ

During his first stage, he attends the classes of Granadian painters such as Rodríguez-Acosta and López Mezquita, attends the Academy of Arts and Trade and meets Ismael González de la Serna and Federico García Lorca. In 1912 he studies in the workshop of Cecilio Pla, at the same time he attends the gathering of Madrid. At the end of 1920 he goes to Paris, where he studies in the Grande Chaumière and carries out his first exhibition in Les Quatre Chemins gallery of París (1926).

He becomes one of the members of the Paris Academy, studying deeply the cubism, post-cubism and surrealism. Together with Picasso, Miró, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz is possibly one of the best-known Spanish artists that lived in Paris among those who worked inside the country. To verify this, a brief series of first-range interchanges: in 1925 he is asked to send one of his works and some other works of different Spanish painters to join the first Exhibition of the Iberian Artists Society  (subsequently he will do it in the exhibitions of Copenhagen (1932) and Berlin (1933)), in 1929 he participates in the exhibition “Spanish Painters and Sculptors residents of Paris”  (1929) of the Botanical Garden; in 1930, where we see the Modern Architecture and Painting of San Sebastian, etc. When he gets back to Spain, in 1932, he collaborates with such organisations as the Constructive Art Group.

Manuel Ángeles Ortiz was open to another influences, he also combined neo -dadaist elements and atmospheres of surrealistic kind, where the presence of Francis Picabia, Miró and Picasso is seen. He was a graphic collaborator of La Gaceta Literaria, Gallo and Martín Fierro.

With the outbreak of the civil war he joins the Antifascist Intellectual Alliance for the culture defence, he displays in the stand of the Spanish Republic in Paris (1937) and from there he goes as an exiled to Buenos Aires. He gets integrated in the intellectual circle of exiles form Argentina and Spain, activity that he combines with the personal discovery of a landscape, a nature very different from the one he was used to back in Europe.

Attracted to the extraordinary land, he goes for a time to Patagonia; at the shore of the Nahuel Huapí lake he collects stones and fossil woods, transformed during millions of years. It is a recovery of previous controversies (Vallecas Academy or Constructive Art Group) about the ability of nature to become art and a revindication of the objet trouvé as reconsideration of the essence of an artistic spirit and bases of aesthetic taste. In those woods there is neither sense nor aspiration to the formal similarity, just the attraction to the surfaces and volumes themselves.

In 1948 he gets back to Paris, where he once more comes into contact with Picasso, with whom he starts to practice ceramics. During the fifties and the sixties, his works consist of a high degree of lyricism, outstanding the series of cut-out collages.