One of the most internationally established contemporary Spanish painter, sculptor and draughtsman, Manolo Valdés was born in Valencia in 1942. He attended the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia and began his career in the 1960s as one of the founding members of Equipo Cronica, a group of artists who took inspiration from Pop Art to challenge the Spanish dictatorship of Franco and the History of Art itself. When the movement ended in 1981, Valdes continued his own artistic exploration centered on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masterpieces. He currently lives and work between Madrid, Spain and New York city, USA.
Manolo Valdés has developed an individual style that reviews History without detracting from the original subject. Quoting figures from well-known works of art by old masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fra Angelico, as well as twentieth-century masters such as Matisse, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, Valdés revitalizes these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. In both paintings and sculptures, he inflates the figure’s size, abstracting form and minimizing detail, while incorporating a lot of roughly applied paint and unusual materials. The timelessness of the image as the axis of the visual experience is the determining factor in his creations. In his works, image and matter are fused in a body of work that wanders between Pop Art and material art, between social and political commitment and a continuous search for reinvention.
http://www.ftn-books.com has the Beelden aan Zee catalogue now available.
