RAFAEL CANOGAR

He belongs to the first generation of informalists of Spain. Disciple of Daniel Vázquez Díaz, in his first works he found a way to get to the historical avant-gardes and very soon, to study abstraction thoroughly. Member of El Paso group, Canogar discovers his path in a personal and independent plastic, where the form, colour and matter are solid structures in his work. As feature writer of his time, he involved himself in an argument against society, based in the media.

He left informalism and got back to figurative art with a new iconography and new materials to meet abstraction again. In 1954 he holds his first individual exhibition in the Altamira Gallery of Madrid. Then he travels to Paris, where he is interested in the theories of constructive or neo-plastic groups as proposals of abstract artists. (De Kooning, Pollock, Fautrier, etc.) In the seventies, his return to abstraction is observed through the series of relieves(1967-1975) and the collages (1976-1978) consisting of the assembly of pictures or rectangles.

He is a painter who always finds himself in the process of constant changes of the following decades, he opts for the superposition of fragment of pieces of paper.

Claudio Coello 6 28001 Madrid tel. (34) 91 435 0174 galeria@josedelamano.com