20th century Spanish

José Caballero went to Madrid to study Industrial Engineering, however in 1932 he dropped out to enrol at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts and at the studio of Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969), whom he had met when Vázquez Díaz was working on his fresco paintings for the La Rábida monastery in Huelva. As a pupil, he met many of the leading artists of the time, becoming close friends with some of them, like the sculptor Alberto Sánchez (1895-1962), whose organic language rooted in popular forms had a great influence on Caballero; Federico García-Lorca, who introduced him to the Teatro Universitario “La Barraca”, for which he began to create stage designs and illustrations; and Pablo Neruda, with whom he collaborated on several occasions.

The Spanish Civil War thwarted many of his projects. In the post-war period, family responsibilities and the traumas he had suffered led him to give up painting and to focus on stage designs for the theatre, set designs for cinema and even window dressing. It would not be until ten years later when he returned to painting. His style was still connected with Surrealism, but throughout this new decade of work he would evolve towards abstraction and to experimentation with materials.

In 1950 he exhibited his work for the first time in a solo show at Galería Clan in Madrid. From that moment onwards, the number of his exhibitions grew exponentially, including shows abroad, with several participations at the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial. In 1964 he took part in the opening show at Galería Juana Mordó and in solo exhibitions at institutions like Ateneo de Madrid or Museo de Bellas Artes of Bilbao. In the late 1960s he was attracted towards , and began to introduce circles, triangles and rhomboids as elements of cosmic symbolism.

In 1973, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian of Lisbon organised a major retrospective of his work, and in 1984 he won Spain’s National Visual Arts Prize. In 1991, the year of his death, a survey show of his work was held at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Seville. Caballero’s works are in many Spanish institutions, including Museo Reina Sofía, ARTIUM and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, as well as in European and American museums, like the Carnegie Institute, the National Gallery for Foreign Art of Bulgaria and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.