Miguel Ángel Campano

MIGUEL ÁNGEL CAMPANO (Madrid, 1948 – Cercedilla, Madrid, 2018).
Untitled.
Set of 26 paintings.
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 21 x 30 cm; 30 x 21 cm each.

This set of 26 canvases is a particularly compelling body of work within Miguel Ángel Campano’s oeuvre, both for its modular nature and its mural quality. Using a limited vocabulary—circles, rectangles, white, black, and earthy tones—the artist constructs a rhythmic composition based on repetition, variation, and the balance between full and empty space.

Each painting functions autonomously, but the set as a whole takes on meaning as an open, almost musical structure. The circle, repeated with variations in scale, color, and position, serves as the central motif of the composition: at times as a solid presence, at others as a void, a reserve, or an absence. This ambivalence between form and void lends depth to the work and transforms an elementary geometric motif into a field of visual tensions.

The alternation of vertical and horizontal formats energizes the whole and prevents any mechanical interpretation. The work reflects one of Campano’s central concerns: understanding painting not only as an image, but as an object, a surface, and a relationship with space. Due to its scope, formal refinement, and visual power, this body of work is of particular interest within his pictorial exploration.

Miguel Ángel Campano was a key figure in the renewal of Spanish painting during the 1970s and 1980s. His work explored the relationships between abstraction and figuration, geometry and gesture, modern tradition and personal language.

In 1996, he received the National Prize for the Visual Arts. The Reina Sofía Museum dedicated a retrospective to him in 1999 and, in 2019, the exhibition *Miguel Ángel Campano. D’après. His work is represented in the Reina Sofía Museum, the IVAM, the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, ARTIUM, the Centre Pompidou, and the Bank of Spain Collection, among other institutions.