JOSÉ GUERRERO

JOSÉ GUERRERO - Sir Francis Drake

Biography of the Artist: José Guerrero (Granada, 1914 - Barcelona, 1994) was a Spanish painter and engraver, recognized for his work framed within abstract expressionism. He studied at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios in Granada and later at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. He was one of the mentors in the creation of the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca. In 1959, he was named Knight of Arts and Letters by the French government, in 1984 he received the Gold Medal of Fine Arts and in 1989 he was decorated by the Rodriguez Acosta Foundation.Throughout his career, Guerrero traveled to several European cities to update himself on the artistic avant-garde of the time, especially those that were developing in Paris. However, it was in New York where his work evolved from figuration to abstraction, joining the trend of action painting.With Guerrero, Spanish art established strong connections with the international art scene, particularly with American Abstract Expressionism. His trip to New York in 1950 sought the stage where modern art took place. Although his painting had no thematic connections or dramatic pretensions to Francoism, Spain and Granada appeared as themes in his work in the years prior to his return, as evidenced in works such as "Andalucía aparición" (1964). His formal references to Granada landscapes and his tense brushstrokes marked his work until 1970, visible in works such as "Brecha de Víznar" (1966), "Tanto monta, monta tanto monta tanto" (1966c) or "Levante" (1969).From 1970, Guerrero began a new stage in his work, highlighting the series "Fosforescencias", followed by a group of works with the theme of the arch as a motif. Subsequently, the compositional order, the mastery of color and his conception of the painting as mural architecture became the foundations of his work, as can be seen in "Canciones de color" (1990). In the seventies, Guerrero became a reference for a new generation of Spanish painters interested in recovering a taste for painting and experimenting with color fields and abstraction with content.