Manolo Valdés

Manolo Valdés is a Spanish artist (Valencia, Spain, 1942) whose career includes painting, sculpture, and printmaking. In 1964, he founded Equipo Crónica together with Rafael Solbes and Juan Antonio Toledo; after Toledo’s early departure, the group continued with Valdés and Solbes until 1981. Their collective work was linked to Pop Art and to a critical view of Spanish society and politics during Franco’s regime.

After the dissolution of Equipo Crónica, he developed an individual career based on the reinterpretation of images from art history. His paintings and sculptures revisit figures and motifs from artists such as Velázquez, Goya, Matisse, and Picasso, with special attention to material, texture, color, and the simplification of forms. In sculpture, he has also worked on a monumental scale.

His work is part of collections such as Museo Reina Sofía, IVAM, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA. He has presented exhibitions in institutions such as IVAM and Museo Reina Sofía, which organized a retrospective of his individual career in 2006. He received the National Prize for Visual Arts in 1983 and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 1998. Leer menos