Antonio Saura

ANTONIO SAURA (Huesca, 1930 - Cuenca, 1998).
"Number Cuba", 1971.
India ink on paper.
Attached certificate of the Antonio Saura Foundation Geneva. Signed by Olivier Weber-Caflisch.
Work reproduced in the catalog raisonné.
Measurements: 20,3 x 26,7 cm; 48 x 54 cm (frame).
Antonio Saura offers us in Number Cuba (1971) a clear sample of his unmistakable visual language. In this work, the artist uses the technique of black ink on paper, exploring the expressiveness of the gestural stroke and the density of the stains to build a vibrant and energetic composition. The work is characterized by the presence of text, although it appears in an inverted and fragmented way, generating a game of perception between the legible and the abstract. This use of the written word as a plastic element reinforces the expressive and visceral character of the piece, in line with the calligraphic and spontaneous approach that defines his style.
Saura, influenced by surrealist automatism and the action painting of artists such as Jackson Pollock, achieves in Número Cuba a sense of movement and tension. The forms seem to expand and collide with each other, while the intensity of the black on the white background accentuates the drama of the image. The seemingly chaotic composition is actually carefully balanced, demonstrating the artist's mastery of gestural control and spatial distribution.
This work is not only a reflection of Saura's unmistakable style, but can also be interpreted within the socio-political context of the time, suggesting a possible allusion to the revolutionary Cuba of the 1970s. Thus, Número Cuba is inscribed within the production of an artist who, throughout his career, used art as a tool for critical expression and the search for his own pictorial identity.
Self-taught, Antonio Saura began painting and writing 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 made his first exhibition in Madrid, at the Buchholz bookstore, where he exhibited his youthful, dreamlike and surrealist works, and 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 absent-mindedness 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 took part in the Venice Biennale in the company of Chillida and Tàpies, and in 1960 he received the Guggenheim Prize in New York, and 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 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 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.