Equipo Crónica

Equipo Crónica (Valencia, 1964 - 1981).
"Desnudo bajando por la escalera", Series Las estampas de la cometa, 1971.
Silkscreen on paper. Copy 60/75.
Publisher; Gustavo Gili S.A.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Bibliography: Michèle Dalmace, Equipo Crónica: Cataloguing Graphic and Multiple Works: 1965-1982, Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes, 1988, nº 33, p. 56.
Measurements: 100 x 70 cm; 114 x 84 cm (frame).
Equipo Crónica, or Crónicas de la Realidad, was a group of Spanish painters active between 1964 and 1981. It was founded by Manolo Valdés, Juan Antonio Toledo, who soon left the group, and Rafael Solbes, whose death in 1981 put an end to the project. The historian and critic Tomás Llorens was also a member of the group. He explains the theoretical basis of the Equipo in a text entitled "La distanciación de la Distanciación" (The Distancing of Distanciation). Likewise, the three painters signed a manifesto in 1965, where they defined themselves as a working group with collective methods and supra-individual goals. Equipo Crónica moved away from the prevailing informalism to cultivate a figurative painting, closely linked to pop-art. Fed up with introspection, these artists went out into the street and observed the world around them, a society of incipient industrialization and tourists. Their style was a unique blend of realism, criticism, pop, pictorial quotations, anachronisms and bittersweet pastiches. There are works by Equipo Crónica in the IVAM in Valencia, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Juan March Foundation and the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, among others. In 2007 an exhibition dedicated to Equipo Crónica was organized at the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca.