20th-21st Century Spanish

Genovés studied in the School of Fine Arts in his hometown of Valencia. Firmly convinced of the need to create an art with a transformative power, he came into contact with various collectives in the post-war Spanish art scene of the 1950s. He joined various groups including Los Siete in 1949; in 1956; and in 1960. His practice underwent a shift while working with this last-named group, as he began to engage with figurative positions and to develop a provocative expressionist painting at odds with Informalismo, the otherwise all-pervasive movement of the time.

After a brief painterly crisis, his work in the 1970s embarked on social and political critique and began to address the subject matter of the individual, initially in made with the use of various illustrations culled from the mass media, flat inks and fixed images.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he started out on a new period in which he focused more on cityscapes and reduced his palette to a range of grey, blue and ochre. More recently, his work has shifted again, this time towards research into the static movement of painting.