Antonio Saura

ANTONIO SAURA (Huesca, 1930 - Cuenca, 1998).
"Mutation", 1980.
Ink on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Attached certificate issued by Archives Antonio Saura.
This work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist, still in progress.
Measurements: 70 x 100 cm.
We are faced with an overwhelming and introspective work, determined by the chaos of strokes and by the chromatism restricted to blacks and whites. Mutation, together with other themes such as crucifixions or crowds of people, were a regular feature in Saura's works. The gestural painting, the repetition of forms, the intensity of the strokes and the interweaving of the unrepeatable and random forms that are the protagonists of these works allude to Saura's experience of the Spanish Civil War, a key episode in Hispanic art associated with Black Spain and the tragedy experienced in the last years of our country.
Self-taught, Antonio Saura began to paint and write in Madrid in 1947. Three years later he held his first individual exhibition in the Libros bookshop in Zaragoza, showing a series of experimental works ("Constelaciones" and "Rayogramas"), produced during the long illness that kept him immobilised for five years from 1943. In 1952 he held his first exhibition in Madrid, at the Buchholz bookshop, where he exhibited his youthful, dreamlike and surrealist works. That same year he visited Paris for the first time, settling in the city. There his work was influenced by artists such as Miró and Man Ray, and he began to produce paintings on canvas and paper of an organic nature, using various techniques. The break with the surrealist group allowed him to open up to other creative avenues, where he began to show the evolution of his work, which progressed towards an instantaneous painting with gestural strokes and a reduced palette of a selective nature, where informalism plays at misdirection between suggestive expressions of line and colour. He made his debut in Paris in 1957 at the Stadler gallery, the same year in which he founded the El Paso group. The following year he took part in the Venice Biennale in the company of Chillida and Tàpies, and in 1960 he was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in New York. In 1963 his first retrospectives were held at the Stedelijk Museum in Eindhoven, the Rotterdamsche Kunstring and the museums of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro (works on paper). Saura's retrospective exhibitions were repeated throughout his career, both in Spain and in Europe and America. In 1966 he exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and took part in the "Bianco e Nero" Print Biennial in Lugano, winning the Grand Prize. The following year he settled in Paris, although he worked and spent every summer in Cuenca, a fundamental pillar of his production since his early years. In 1968 he abandoned oil painting to devote himself exclusively to works on paper. In 1979 he won a prize at the First Biennial of Engraving in Heidelberg, in 1981 he was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, and the following year he was awarded the Gold Medal of Fine Arts. He has exhibited all over the world and is represented in the most important national and international contemporary art museums, including the Neue Nationalgalierie in Berlin, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London.