José Manuel Broto

JOSÉ MANUEL BROTO GIMENO (Zaragoza, 1949).
"The Cross. Paris, 1988.
Acrylic and collage on canvas.
Signed and dated on the back.
With label on the back from the Galeria Maeght in Barcelona.
Provenance: Important Spanish Collection.
Sizes: 230 x 230 cm.
At the end of the eighties, Broto's work is characterised by his preference for large formats, in which he puts diffuse and organic forms in dialogue with geometric elements. In this magnificent painting, the insertion of the cross in a space with no apparent limits (suggesting spiritual immensity) is not only a formal device. It foreshadows, to a certain extent, the series that Broto would dedicate to Saint John of the Cross and Spanish mysticism. Broto's abstraction knows different periods, but in all of them, his attractive compositions are the fruit of a multi-layered, symbolic and plastic work. Textures and colours, concept and imagination were made to transform space into an abyss. Certainly, space becomes abysmal in this painting, magnetising the spectator.
An Aragonese painter framed within the new abstraction of the seventies, he is considered one of the most significant figures of contemporary Spanish painting. José Manuel Broto studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zaragoza, and exhibited his work for the first time in 1968, showing a style in line with constructivism. In 1972 he moved to Barcelona, where he founded the group Trama. However, after the dissolution of the group, Broto moved into a language close to abstract expressionism, incorporating a landscape of primitive nature into his work. He showed these new works in his first solo exhibition in Paris, held in 1984 at the Adrien Maeght gallery. Since 1985 he has lived and worked in Paris. Settled in Paris, he soon overcame the so-called "abstract impressionism" of the early eighties and freed himself from the elements which, after his trip to Italy (1982), were added to his iconographic and chromatic repertoire, giving rise to a series of paintings with a markedly romantic tone. After ten years in the French capital, during which he coincided with other Spanish artists such as Barceló, Campano and Sicilia, he moved to Mallorca. With the use of large formats, the next step in his work is the recovery of an abstraction with a strong chromatic content and the advance in the spatial definition of his canvases, as shown in Capricho (1987) and La misión (1988). He has been awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1995), in 1997 he was awarded the ARCO Prize by the Critics' Association, and in 2003 the Aragón Goya Prize for Engraving. In 1995 the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him. He is currently represented in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, the FRAC (Midi-Pyrénées, France), the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection in New York, the Juan March Foundation, the Reina Sofía, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Fond National d'Art Contemporain in Paris, the Kampo Collection in Tokyo, the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the DOVE Collection in Zurich, the Ateneum in Helsinki, the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation in Amsterdam, the Maeght Collection in France, the La Caixa Collection in Barcelona, the Preussag Collection in Hanover and the IVAM in Valencia.