Manolo Millares

Manuel Millares Sall (born January 17, 1926 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria , † August 14, 1972 in Madrid ; also Manolo Millares ) was a Spanish self-taught painter and artist .

Life

As an autodidact, Millares developed figurative painting based on surrealism in the 1940s . In 1953 he moved to Madrid and began to turn to abstract, informal art. In 1957 Millares founded together with other artists such as Antonio Saura , Rafael Canogar and Manuel Riverathe avant-garde group El Paso (The Step) in Madrid. After his works were shown in San Pablo in 1957, his painting found a growing resonance outside Spain and especially in the USA from 1958 onwards. In 1959 he came into contact with his long-time gallery owner Daniel Cordier, who showed his work in Paris (from 1961) and Frankfurt (from 1960), while Pierre Matisse presented his pictures in New York from 1961.

plant

Millares is still one of the most important Spanish painters of contemporary art after 1945. Millares occupies a special position among the informal, gestural-abstract artists due to his Canarian origins. He was very interested in anthropology . He became known for his spectacular assemblages , some of which were made of canvas and some of burlap. Millares composed his pictures mostly from wooden substructures and canvases of various types, which he folded, crumpled, sewn or compressed in such a way that relief-like bodies that are vaguely reminiscent of human forms emerged on the picture ground. He left some parts of the canvas untreated, others he dipped in liquid paint or generously coated them. Canvases were often roughly sewn together to leave the traces of work visible and to create cracks or voids. His physical painting in dark black, white and red tones virtually configures the surface. The jute fabrics used by Millares, which were first produced in 1953, are deeply rooted in the prehistory of the Canary Islands, especially among the indigenous people, the Guanches . His work shows clear traces of the influence of this autochthonous Canarian culture, which preceded the Spanish one. The structure of the leather and fabrics of the Canarian natives is comparable to the texture of Millare's pictures made of burlap. The corpses of this pre-Spanish people embalmed in the cult of the dead were known to him thanks to the extensive exhibitions in the Museo Canario de Las Palmas.

Due to its gestural-abstract language of forms, Millares is associated with the movement of informal art , in which the artist designs in an actionist manner. Millares developed his pictorial language under the influence of the surrealists' écriture automatique and the cave paintings of the natives of the Canary Islands. The content and expression of his painting show political allusions and are somewhat close to existentialism and surrealism .

In 1970 he produced a film about his life and work that was shot by his wife Elvireta Escobio and showed paintings interspersed with images of war, fascism and desolate landscapes. His nephew, the architect and director Juan Millares Alonso , filmed the artist's memories in 2005 with the documentary cuadernos de contabilidad de Manolo Millares (Manolo Millares' bookkeeping), which the artist himself put on paper in accounting journals and published in 1998.

Exhibitions

With the exhibition I Salón Nacional de Arte No Figurativo in Valencia in 1956, Millares received important early support. It was organized by José Luis Fernández del Amo, director of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, and the critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni. The exhibition at the Ateneo de Madrid , a private cultural institution in Madrid, in 1957, in which he showed his assemblages with jute canvases for the first time and his nomination and participation at the Venice Biennale in 1958, brought him international recognition. The galleries Pierre Matisse and Daniel Cordier signed contracts with him in 1959 and presented his works many times from 1960. He participated in the exhibitions European Art Today: 35 Painters and Sculptors in 1959 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and in Before Picasso: After Miró in 1960 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In Spain his work was represented by the Galeriá Juana Mordó since 1964. This year a solo exhibition took place at the Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. In 1968 the second participation in the Venice Biennale followed. One of the last exhibitions before his death in 1972 with over 40 paintings and gouaches took place from September 24 to November 4, 1971 in collaboration with Juana Mordó in the Margarete Lauter Gallery in Mannheim. The paintings from Millares' last creative years were finally on view in his last exhibition during his lifetime from November 23, 1971 to January 9, 1972 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris .

Posthumous exhibitions took place in the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York (1974), a retrospective in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (1992) and in the Sen-oku Hakuko Kan Museum in Tokyo (2003) instead of. Alfonso de la Torre's catalog raisonné of Millares' paintings was published in 2004 by the Fundacion Azcona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

literature

• Moreno Galván, JM Manolo Millares . Gustavo Gili, DL Barcelona 1970. B-24978-1970 (Spanish, English and French).
• Peter Iden , Rolf Lauter : Pictures for Frankfurt , inventory catalog Museum for Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 98–99. ISBN 978-3-7913-0702-2 .
• Millares : Obra en Canarias, works from collections in the Canary Islands , 1989, ISBN 978-8487137242 .
• França, José-Augusto: Millares , Éditions Cercle d'art, Paris, 1991.
• Millares : Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid, 9 de enero-16 de marzo, 1992. ISBN 978-8480260008 .
• Gérald Schurr:  Le guidargus de la peinture , Les Éditions de l'Amateur, 1993.
• VV.AA .: The history of Spanish art . Cologne 1997. ISBN 3-89508-700-9 .
• Emmanuel Bénézit: Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, graveurs , Gründ, 1999.
• Jean-Pierre Delarge, Dictionnaire des arts plastiques modern et contemporains , Gründ, 2001.
• Manolo Millares, luto de Oriente y Occidente, Madrid 2003. ISBN 978-8496008229 .
• A. De la Torre: Manolo Millares, pintura, catálogo razonado . Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2004. ISBN 978-84-8026-236-1 .
• Manolo Millares, Eduardo Westerdahl: El artista y el crítico: Manolo Millares y Eduardo Westerdahl, correspondencia 1950–1969 . La Fábrica, Madrid 2011, ISBN 84-92841-79-6 (Spanish).
• Manolo Millares - Antoni Tàpies : An Informel Step , De Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong 2019.

Web links

• Biography on the Waddington Custot Gallery website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Galería Juana Mordó archive , Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
2. ↑ Manolo Millares, Galerie Lauter, Mannheim 1971, OCLC 997464744 .