20th-21st Century Spanish

Chirino’s interest in sculpture began as a youth when he worked alongside his father in the workshops of the local shipyard. In 1944 he began to study art at an academy founded by the sculptor Manuel Ramos in his hometown of Las Palmas. In 1948 he travelled for the first time to Madrid to study Humanities. He intended to study English philology, but soon abandoned the idea to enrol at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, where he trained until 1952.

It was in those days when he started to travel to Paris, London and Italy, among other places, to study ancient and modern sculpture. In 1953 he returned to Las Palmas, and there he set up his first studio, where he worked with his close friend Manolo Millares (1926-1972).

In the company of Millares and other artists, in 1955 he decided to move to Madrid with the intention of living and working there. Three years later he joined the

 El Paso Group 

founded in 1957 and formed by artists Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Rafael Canogar, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Suárez, Pablo Serrano and the critics José Ayllón y Manuel Conde. This group was instrumental in promoting avant-garde art in post-war Spain. Its style and manifesto dovetailed with the European movement known as Art Informel and Informalismo, its variant in Spain. Notwithstanding the strong individuality of each one of its members, the artworks produced by the collective shared a marked visual consistency, expressed in the abstraction of the figure, experimentation with new materials removed from convention uses, individual expressiveness and the triumph of gesture and matter.

and began to create non-objective works. That same year he had his first solo exhibition at Ateneo in Madrid.

In the 1970s Chirino incorporated the spiral into his work and this new feature was to become a recurrent motif in his pieces from then on. In 1976 he was actively involved in drawing up the El Hierro Manifesto.

In 1980 he was granted Spain’s National Visual Arts Prize. A year later he was appointed president of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, and he chaired its executive board until 1992. A year earlier he had opened CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) in his hometown, an art centre he had conceived and which he directed until 2003.

In 2006, a catalogue raisonné of his work was presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In 2008 he obtained the Fundación Gabarrón Visual Arts Prize, awarded for the first time to a Spanish artist.