José Manuel Broto

JOSÉ MANUEL BROTO GIMENO (Zaragoza, 1949).
Untitled, 1971.
Mixed media. Composition of cardboard on cardboard.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 51 x 37 cm; 56 x 42 cm (frame).
Aragonese painter framed within the new abstraction of the seventies, being considered one of the most significant figures of contemporary Spanish painting. José Manuel Broto studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zaragoza, and exhibited his work for the first time in 1968, showing a style in line with constructivism. In 1972 he moved to Barcelona, where he founded the Trama group. However, after the dissolution of the group, Broto entered a language close to abstract expressionism, which incorporates into his work a landscape of primitive nature. He will show these new works in his first solo exhibition in Paris, held in 1984 at the Adrien Maeght gallery. Since 1985 he lives and works in Paris. Settled in Paris, he immediately overcame the so-called "abstract impressionism" stage of the early eighties and freed himself from the elements that, after his trip to Italy (1982), were added to his iconographic and chromatic repertoire, resulting in a series of paintings with a markedly romantic tone. After ten years in the French capital, during which he coincides with other Spanish artists such as Barceló, Campano or Sicilia, he moves to Mallorca. With the use of large formats, the next step in his work is the recovery of an abstraction of strong chromatic content and the advance in the spatial definition in his canvases, as shown in Capricho (1987) or La misión (1988). He has been awarded the National Prize of Plastic Arts (1995), in 1997 he was awarded the ARCO Prize of the Critics Association, and in 2003 the Aragón Goya Prize for Engraving. In 1995 the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him. He is currently represented in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español de Cuenca, the FRAC (Midi-Pyrénées, France), the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection in New York, the Juan March Foundation, the Reina Sofía, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Fond National d'Art Contemporain in Paris, the Kampo Collection in Tokyo, the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the DOVE Collection in Zurich, the Ateneum in Helsinki, the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation in Amsterdam, the Maeght in France, La Caixa in Barcelona, the Preussag in Hanover and the IVAM in Valencia.