Juan Genovés

Juan Genovés (born May 31, 1930 in Valencia) is a Spanish painter and graphic artist. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia, from the beginning of his professional career he was a restless painter and concerned both about the need to renew Spanish art and about the role of art and the artist in society. His firm conviction about transformative art and committed to the environment led him to form part of very significant groups in the postwar Spanish scene: Los Siete (1949), Grupo Parpalló (1956) and Hondo (1960). In this last group, which involved new figurative approaches to informalism, Genovés developed an expressionist and provocative painting. In the sixties, after a brief pictorial crisis and a deep relationship with the opposition movements to the Franco regime, he began to raise two themes: the "individual alone", initially resolved as a "collage" in relief, and the " multitude ", treated with spot colors and film-like plastic structures. This last proposal will materialize over time in a singular political realism of strong social denunciation, made from the manipulation of images provided by the mass media. In the eighties a new period began in which he became interested in the urban landscape, reducing it to a chromatic range of grays, blues and ocher that constitute what has been called "spaces of solitude". He has been awarded, among others, the Honorable Mention (XXXIII Biennale di Venezia, 1966), the Gold Medal (VI Biennale Internazionale de San Marino, 1967), the Marzotto Internazionale Prize (1968), the National Prize for Plastic Arts of Spain (1984), the Prize of Plastic Arts of the Generalitat Valenciana (2002) and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, Ministry of Culture (2005).