Juan Genovés, a master of contemporary painting, captured the poetry of solitude and the strength of collectivity in his work, revealing the complexity of the human experience through his distinctive visual language
Silkscreen 82×66
Silkscreen 66×82
What is the original graphic work
An artistic creation obtained by means of different engraving and/or printing processes, in which, in addition, the artist’s direct intervention in these processes must be present.
Original graphic work in a unique worldwide series of two silkscreen prints numbered and signed by the artist from 1/99 to 99/99
This visionary artist weaves in his work the tapestry of the human condition with brushstrokes that transcend the canvas to resonate in the heart of the viewer
Awarded the Honourable Mention at the XXXIII Venice Biennale (1966), the Gold Medal at the VI San Marino International Biennale (1967), the Marzotto Internazionale Prize (1968), the National Plastic Arts Prize (1984), the Plastic Arts Prize of the Generalitat Valenciana (2002) and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts from the Ministry of Culture (2005).
1930 – 2020. Until his last days he was doing what he was most passionate about: painting.
Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia, from the beginning of his professional career he was a restless painter, concerned both with the need to renew Spanish art and with the role of art and the artist in society.
His firm conviction about transformative art committed to the environment led him to form part of very significant groups in the Spanish post-war scene: “Los Siete” (1949), “Parpalló” (1956) and “Hondo” (1960). In this last group, which brought new figurative approaches to informalism, Genovés developed an expressionist and provocative style of painting
Juan Genovés in his studio
In the sixties, after a brief pictorial crisis and a deep relationship with the opposition movements to the Franco regime, he began to work on two themes: “the individual alone”, initially resolved as a collage in relief, and “the crowd”, treated with flat inks and plastic structures with a cinematographic look.
Over time, the latter became a singular political realism with a strong social denunciation, based on the manipulation of images provided by the mass media. In the 1980s he began a new period in which he became interested in the urban landscape, reducing it to a chromatic range of greys, blues and ochres that constitute what have come to be called
“spaces of solitude”.
In the last decades of his life, his work continued to take the crowd as a point of reference. The artistic and social-political content of his work developed alongside a pictorial language based on the static movement of the image, its visual rhythm, and the use of the contrast between background and figure
