Antonio Saura

ANTONIO SAURA (Huesca, 1930 - Cuenca, 1998).
Untitled, 1992.
Mixed media on panel.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 68 x 48 cm; 90 x 76 cm (frame).

The portraits that Saura made in the decade of the 90's show the evolution that his work is undergoing, that advances towards an instantaneous painting of gestural strokes and reduced palette of selective character, where the informalism plays to the absent-mindedness between suggestive expressions of line and color. His plastic reflections always lay on the impossibility of capturing a face in his portraits, and it is in them where the vertigo of identity, the elusiveness of expression, the difficult apprehension of a gaze... becomes an obsession for an artist like Saura.

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 for a period of five years from 1943. 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 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 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 exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and participated in the Biennial of Engraving "Bianco e Nero" 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. He 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.