Alfonso Albacete

(Antequera, Malaga, 1950)

Author's artworks

20th-21st Century Spanish

After his beginnings in painting at the studio of Juan Bonafé (1901-1969) in La Alberca, Albacete went on to study Fine Arts and Architecture in Valencia and Madrid.

His early work flirted with
and
, before finally opting for painting in the late 1970s with a well-defined colourist style predicated on a systematic, constructive brushwork. He had his first solo exhibition at Galería Chys, in Murcia, in 1972.

Albacete is fond of working in thematic series, which he explores methodically. A particular mention is deserved for his different series on bathers, the painter, the city of Vienna, and Narcissus. In the mid 1980s, his reliance on geometry waned in favour of a more pronounced presence of light, lending particular importance to shadows, as well as a greater use of symbolic figures. While always maintaining a figurative anchor, in the early 1990s his interest in objects per se gave way to a more experimental examination of the painterly space itself and issues pertaining to it.

In 1988, the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo held the first retrospective of his work, which is to be found in major Spanish and international collections and museums.