José Manuel Broto

JOSÉ MANUEL BROTO (Zaragoza, 1949).
Untitled, 1986.
Acrylic on canvas.
Signed, dated and located (Paris) on the back.
Size: 95 x 130 cm; 97 x 132 cm (frame).
With an image of gestural character, the author does not limit himself to a composition but goes further, indicating to the spectator that it is about forms, ideas or suggestions that go beyond the frontiers of the purely pictorial, a gestural stroke associated with colour as a plastic value of substance. At the end of the eighties, Broto's work was characterised by his preference for large formats, in which he puts diffuse and organic forms in dialogue with geometric elements, as can be seen in this work where different elements seem to cohabit in an indeterminate and inconcrete space.
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 National Prize for Plastic Arts (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 in France, the La Caixa Collection in Barcelona, the Preussag in Hanover and the IVAM in Valencia.