Lithograph

Black and white lithograph of a man viewed from the perspective of his feet as if he is lying down by Spanish artist Rafael Canogar in 1969 and titled "El Muerto" (The Dead). Edition 4/20. Titled along the bottom edge and signed and dated in lower right corner.

Born in 1935 in Toledo, Spain, after the Spanish Civil War and a period of transition, Rafael Canogar and his family took up residence in Madrid in 1944. He began his training with painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, with whom he mastered a figurative language inspired by the work of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. In 1954 Canogar began to experiment with abstraction and informalism, motivated by Michel Tapié’s call for a collective art phenomenon. His canvases, increasingly monochromatic, sought to achieve a balance between form and matter, between formal and informal painting. Within this trajectory he formed the group El Paso (1957–1960) alongside Luis Feito, Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera and Antonio Saura among others, which ushered in a key phase in the modernization of the Spanish avant-garde. Following a trip to the USA in the early 1960s, and a peak in his international recognition in 1964, Canogar abandoned informalism, which had become assimilated by Francisco Franco’s regime as ‘official’ art. Using wood and polyester reinforced fibreglass, Canogar escaped the boundaries of the canvas adding three-dimensionality, volume and flesh to his figures and called viewers to engage with the social unrest that defined those turbulent years in Francoist Spain.

H 30 in. x W 22 in. x D .01 in.