Juan Genovés

JUAN GENOVÉS (Valencia, 1930 – Madrid, 2020)
"Contiguo," 2019.
Acrylic on giclée print.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner. Titled on the reverse.
Provenance: Marlborough Gallery.
Measurements: 60 x 74 cm; 77 x 91 cm (with frame).

In this work, Juan Genovés distills, with the clarity of his later years, some of the essential elements of his visual language: the bird’s-eye view, the fragmented crowd, the shadow as a dramatic extension of the body, and the presence of a dominant form that structures the space. The large red mass that fills the composition functions not only as a visual element of extraordinary power but also as a field of tension against which the figures establish relationships of proximity, movement, and proportion.

“Contiguo” belongs to Genovés’s final period, in which the artist refined his celebrated language of crowds to an extreme degree. Since the 1960s, the human figure viewed from above has become one of his most recognizable hallmarks: individuals who run, gather, separate, or seem to obey invisible forces. In recent decades, however, that iconography, which has political roots, has become more open and metaphysical. We are no longer necessarily faced with a specific scene of repression, flight, or surveillance, but rather with a choreography of the contemporary condition: minuscule bodies alongside colossal structures, beings moving on the threshold of something greater than themselves.

The title reinforces this interpretation. “The Adjacent” refers to proximity, to possible contact, to that which borders without necessarily merging. In the composition, the figures seem to orbit around a monumental red presence, at once close and inaccessible. Genovés thus transforms the space into a scene of relationships: between the individual and the crowd, between emptiness and mass, between movement and suspension, between human fragility and the almost abstract forcefulness of form.

Genovés never abandons the ethical dimension of the image, but in works like this one, he imbues it with extraordinary compositional sophistication: the clear void, the elongated shadows, the almost musical rhythm of the figures, and the deep, resounding red make *Contiguo* a work that fully represents his late maturity.

Juan Genovés achieved notable international recognition beginning in the 1960s. Among other honors, he was awarded the Honorable Mention at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966, the Gold Medal at the 6th San Marino International Biennale in 1967, the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1984, and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2005. His famous painting *El abrazo*, housed in the Reina Sofía Museum, became one of the great visual icons of the Spanish Transition.

Genovés is represented in prominent national and international collections. His work is held by institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; the IVAM in Valencia; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels; the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; The Israel Museum in Jerusalem; and the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, among many others.