Antonio Saura

ANTONIO SAURA (Huesca, 1930 - Cuenca, 1998).
"Untitled", 1960.
Ink on paper.
Signed and dated in the upper right corner.
Dedicated to the photographer Oriol Maspons on the back.
Provenance: Maspons family.
Measurements: 24 x 54 cm; 36 x 65 cm (frame).
Three characters whose attributes suggest ecclesiastical and monarchical estates (crosses, crowns, scepters...) appear reduced to monstrous beings, depositaries of a violence contained in the energetic and gestural stroke that brings them closer to abstraction without abandoning, nevertheless, the limits of figuration. The palette reduced to black and white emphasizes the expressiveness and critical mood of this painting, faithful to the corrosive spirit that Saura never abandoned. The informalism of Action Painting and the nightmarish universe of surrealism were the sources from which Saura drank, but to submit them to his will, to exercise from them his own plastic revolution.
Self-taught, Antonio Saura began to paint and write in Madrid in 1947. Three years later he held his first individual exhibition at the Libros bookstore in Zaragoza, showing a series of experimental works ("Constelaciones" and "Rayogramas"), created during the long illness that kept him immobilized since 1943, for a period of five years. In 1952 he held his first exhibition in Madrid, at the Buchholz bookstore, 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 dedicated himself to making paintings on canvas and paper of an organic nature, using various techniques. The break with the surrealist group allows him to open up to other ways of creation, where he begins to show the evolution that his work is undergoing, which moves towards an instantaneous painting of gestural strokes and reduced palette of selective character, where informalism plays the misleading between suggestive expressions of line and color. He made his debut in Paris in 1957, at the Stadler Gallery, the same year he founded the El Paso group. The following year he participates in the Venice Biennale in the company of Chillida and Tàpies, and in 1960 he receives the Guggenheim Prize in New York. In 1963 the first retrospectives are dedicated to him, in the Stedelijk Museum of Eindhoven, the Rotterdamsche Kunstring and in the museums of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro (works on paper). Saura's retrospective exhibitions are repeated throughout his career, both in Spain and in Europe and America. In 1966 he exhibits at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and participates in the Biennial of Engraving "Bianco e Nero" of Lugano, obtaining 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 was awarded 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 contemporary art museums, both nationally and internationally, 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.