Spanish art in the 1980s was a period of creative flourishing that would set the benchmark throughout the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. The Arte GlobaL team has selected these eight key artists from this creative period, from across Spain and representing various generations.
José Manuel Sicilia
José María Sicilia (Madrid, Spain, 1954) is one of the most important figures in Spanish painting of the 1980s. He abandoned his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid to move to Paris in 1980, where he would begin his artistic career.
Sicilia's work is based on the exploration of form, space, and light through pictorial abstraction. It has a recognized expressionist character, and also explores the monochrome of white.
During his career, the artist received the National Prize for Plastic Arts from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1989.
The artist's work is represented in museums such as the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He currently resides between Paris and Sóller, where he has created a foundation dedicated to young artists. In 2015, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.
Juan Uslé
Juan Uslé (Santander, Spain, 1954) is one of Spain's foremost artists. His work is recognized as some of the most evocative of his generation, with a distinctive style steeped in abstraction.
During the 1980s, Uslé's painting evolved from an abstract expressionist style indebted to Willem de Kooning to fascinating, very dark maritime landscapes. These paintings capture, in some ways, his solitary arrival in New York and how he established his inner identity there.
His work changed in the 1990s, after two years of living in this city. Romantic references to landscape and any traces of expressionism disappeared from his work, and he developed an extremely personal language of simultaneous styles.
From this point on, his works are characterized by their unique, intense, non-naturalistic colors, and by the alternation of gesture and geometry, sobriety and baroque, dynamism and immobility, characteristics that can appear alone or alongside their opposite, in all possible proportions.
Uslé's work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in both Europe and the United States, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; and the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany, among others. His participation in Documenta 9 Kassel (1992), the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, and his receipt of the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2002, among others, have been among the highlights.
Miquel Barceló
Miquel Barceló (Mallorca, Spain, 1957) is a contemporary Spanish painter and sculptor. His work is recognized for its experimental exploration, incorporating elements such as decomposition, light, and the natural landscape.
His work—in a neo-expressionist style—is created from a variety of materials, surfaces, and textures. The artist explores matter through a process of constant transformation and metamorphosis. Whether in painting, drawing, ceramics, or bronze, his pieces narrate physical behavior, the passage of time, and decomposition.
When creating, Barceló is inspired by a kind of desire, imagination, or ritual driven by the interaction with time and memory, the sea and the sky. His pieces are understood as visible traces, offering, in turn, a rupture of artistic conventions. For the artist, to destroy is to create.
His international career began in the early 1980s, a period in which he participated in the São Paulo Biennial (1981) and Documenta in Kassel (1982). In 1986, he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts, and since then his work has been recognized through the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts (2003) and the Sorolla Prize from the Hispanic Society of America in New York (2007). Barceló's work is represented in the most important contemporary art museums around the world. These include the MoMA in New York, USA; the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; and the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, Spain.
Cristina Iglesias
Cristina Iglesias (1956, San Sebastián, Spain) lives and works in Torrelodones, Madrid, Spain
Cristina Iglesias is considered one of the most innovative artists of recent years internationally. She possesses a very defined style in sculpture, photography, and silkscreen images. At first glance, the work appears to be a photograph of her sculptural installations, when in fact it represents miniature models of the artist's work. With this, Cristina Iglesias aims to explore a space within another and invite the viewer to enter, seeking a physical and psychological experience. In this way, the work becomes a dead end to which she incorporates additional narrative information through interweavings formed by letters and words.
She has been awarded the Grosse Kunstpreis Prize (Berlin) and her work is present in collections such as the Tate Gallery (London), CAPC - Museum of Contemporary Art (Bordeaux), Guggenheim Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Bilbao), MACBA - Museum of Contemporary Art (Barcelona), among others.
Luis Gordillo
Luis Gordillo (Seville, Spain, 1934) is a renowned Spanish abstract artist. He began his artistic training at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Seville.
Among the artist's various lines of research, informalism stands out. His interpretation of Pop art from the 1970s is also notable. His works highlight the importance of series and repetition, as well as the connection between thought, experience, and expression. Part of his work relates to the tradition of documentary photography and popular cultures linked to graphic design.
Gordillo's artistic career has been recognized on numerous occasions. In 2012, he was named Favorite Son of Andalusia; in 2008, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Castilla-La Mancha at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca; in 2007, he was awarded the Velázquez Prize for Fine Arts, the equivalent in painting to the Cervantes Prize; in 2004, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid; in 1996, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts by the Ministry of Culture; in 1991, he received the Andalusian Prize for Fine Arts; and in 1981, he received the National Prize for Fine Arts. His work is part of important national and international collections.
José Manuel Broto
José Manuel Broto (Zaragoza, 1949) is a Spanish abstract artist. He founded the Trama group (Barcelona, 1976), a novel and radical collective of political, artistic, and literary interventions within the Spanish avant-garde movement of the mid-1970s.
Color, expression, and poetry are common elements in Broto's painting. The artist champions a style of painting that goes beyond the gestural, in opposition to the formalism championed by American Abstract Expressionism. Contrasts and lyricism are common in his work, as well as the dialogue between organic and geometric forms.
The Zaragoza native's work is featured in important collections around the world. In Spain, these include the CAAM (Atlantic Center of Modern Art), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; the La Caixa Testimony Collection, Barcelona; the Argentaria Collection, Madrid; and the Bank of Spain Collection, Madrid; among others. International collections include the Ateneum Museum, Helsinki; the PREUSSAG Collection, Hannover; the Tore A. Holm Collection, Stockholm; the FNAC (Fond National d'Art Contemporain), Paris; and the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam; among others.
José María Yturralde
José María Yturralde (Cuenca, Spain, 1942) is a renowned Spanish contemporary artist. He holds a Bachelor's and Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia; is a Full Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos, Valencia; Professor of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia; and is the 2020 National Prize for Fine Arts laureate.
The artist's work is characterized by technological, geometric, and kinetic abstraction. An approach that touches on op art and minimalism. The artist represents impossible, lightweight figures, precise in color, and simulating movement.
Behind the image lie insights into art and science. A humanistic and mathematical approach, where the human condition is the origin of artistic creation.
The artist's work is featured in major public and private collections, both national and international, such as (selection): Juan March Foundation, Palma de Mallorca; Pilar i Joan Miró Foundation, Palma de Mallorca; Generalitat Valenciana; Hastings Foundation, New York; IVAM. Institut Valenciá d'Art Modern, Valencia; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; Musée de Verck sur Mer, France; Municipal Museum of Print, Roquebrune - Cap - Martin, France; City Museum of Valencia, Cortes Valencianas; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Catalan Countries, Banyoles; Museum of Spanish Abstract Art, Cuenca; Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza; Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Espiritu Santo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Lanzarote; Museum of Alto Aragón, Huesca; Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia; Museum of Fine Arts of Vitoria; Museum of the City of Valencia; Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid; Novgorod State Museum, Russia; MNCARS - Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid; National Museum of Wroclaw, Poland; Villafamés Popular Museum of Contemporary Art, Castellón; Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia; Patio Herreriano. Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art, Valladolid; PR Norman Collection, New Orleans; Complutense University of Madrid; Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Miguel Angel Campano
Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948) is one of the leading figures in the so-called renewal of Spanish painting, which took place in the 1980s and in which Ferrán García Sevilla, José Manuel Broto, José María Sicilia and Miquel Barceló also participated.
The tension between abstraction and figuration, and the contrast between solids and voids, takes on a decisive experimental component in his work. To achieve this stylistic breakthrough, Campano revisits pictorial tradition and takes as his starting point certain themes and works from French painting, by artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Nicolas Poussin, and Paul Cézanne. With these, Campano embarks on the construction of a radicalized aesthetic, which brings together some of the most energetic lines of the minimalist tradition and the gestural variations of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, along with allusions to historical avant-garde movements associated with Constructivism and Suprematism.
Campano's work—winner of the National Prize for Visual Arts in 1996—became a privileged site of experimentation and transgression, constantly questioning painting from within painting itself. This evolution becomes more evident from 1991, the year this exhibition opens.
