Andreu Alfaro

(Valencia, 1929 – 2012)

Author's artworks

20th-21st Century Spanish

Andreu Alfaro is a seminal reference for abstract sculpture in Spain. He started his career in 1956 as a self-taught artist, with drawings that did not as yet have a well-established style. However, after visiting the exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art at the 1958 Brussels Expo, his practice shifted towards three dimensions and he began to create his first sculptures, with an evident constructivist influence.

His three-dimensional work underwent constant transformation, responding to his ongoing visual research. He experimented with constructivist languages while, on the other hand, he also explored the physical and volumetric qualities of stone in a body of work of delicate rounded pieces inspired by classical sculpture and seventeenth and eighteenth century masters.

In the early 1960s he joined the
, founded with the goal of promoting the contemporary art made in Valencia in the wider international context. In 1966 he took part for the first time at the Venice Biennale, where he would exhibit again in 1976 and 1995.

In the 1970s he created Generatrices, his most celebrated body of work which includes, among other sculptures, Un món per a infants, on view in the Open Air Sculpture Museum on Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid.

Worth highlighting in the artist’s overall output is his solid commitment with pubic art. Particularly remarkable in that regard are Espacio para una fuente and Cosmos, his first large-format sculptures. Alfaro conceived his public works as true collective monuments.Throughout his career Alfaro was distinguished with many awards, including the 1980 Jaime I Prize, the 1981 Spanish National Visual Arts Award, the 1991 Alfons Roig Visual Arts Prize from the Valencia Provincial Council, and the 2012 University of Valencia Medal.

Andreu Alfaro died on 13 December 2012 in Rocafort, Valencia.

His work has been overviewed in several retrospective shows, most notably in the 1979 exhibition at the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid and another in 2007 at IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) in Valencia.