20th - 21st Century Spanish

Rafael Canogar is one of Spain’s most chameleonic artists. He was a pupil of Ascensio Martiarena (1884- 1966) in San Sebastian, he later trained at Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the city where he settle when he was only nineteen. During there years, he also attended the studio of the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882 - 1969), whose neo - cubist influence would significantly mark his early work.

In 1957, along with other Spanish artists like Antonio Saura or Manolo Millares, he founded the , a collective defined by the practice of a painting which could be described as non - objective rather than abstract. He was a member of the group until it disbanded in 1960. In those early years he began to introduce fragments of photographs and figurative elements into his works. In 1964 he totally abandoned and abstraction to take up a painting focused on an unflinching chronicle of reality, using a palette dominated by grey hues and more restrained than in his previous work.

He did not return to abstraction until 1975, but now incorporating formal elements borrowed from the cubist tradition, and then moving later to monochrome painting. In 1983 Canogar was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize.