Rafael Forteza

RAFAEL FORTEZA (Palma de Mallorca, 1955).
"Chances", 1990, Palma.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner. Signed, dated, titled and located on the back.
Measurements: 146 x 114 cm.

Important painting of Rafael Forteza, realized in 1990, in a moment of full creative maturity of the artist, coinciding with his international projection and his consolidation inside the panorama of the Spanish contemporary art.
The work is part of the personal language that Forteza developed in the late eighties and early nineties, characterized by a synthesis between gesture, sign and structure, where references to informalism, post-conceptual abstraction and a personal iconography full of ambiguity and poetic tension coexist. In Azares, the pictorial surface is constructed as a space of stratification, in which matter, stroke and drawing are freely but rigorously articulated, reflecting the importance of process and controlled accident as generators of meaning.

This work is part of a particularly relevant stage in Forteza's career, marked by his international activity and his continued participation in fairs such as ARCO, Art Basel and Art Cologne, as well as his presence in important public and private collections. At the beginning of the 1990s, the artist lived in France and Germany, contexts that reinforced his dialogue with the European gestural and informalist tradition, at the same time as he consolidated his own recognizable and coherent discourse.

Rafael Forteza is one of the most relevant and consolidated figures of contemporary Spanish plastic art that emerged in the 1980s. Trained at the University of Barcelona, from the beginning he has developed his own language that articulates gesture, matter and sign, in dialogue with the European informalist tradition and the post-conceptual currents of the second half of the twentieth century.
His career reaches an early international projection, with works incorporated to first level institutional collections, such as the MoMA in New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Céret, a key institution in the history of European modern art.
Since the late eighties he has maintained a continuous presence in the international art circuit, participating regularly in fairs such as ARCO, Art Basel and Art Cologne, and exhibiting in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In 2002, the Casal Solleric of Palma dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him, confirming the coherence and solidity of his career.
Awarded several national and international prizes, including the Miró Foundation Prize on several occasions, Rafael Forteza's work is now held in numerous public and private collections, making him a stable reference in Spanish contemporary art, with sustained recognition at both the institutional and market levels.