Mompó, Manuel Hernández

20th Century Spanish

The son of a painter, Manuel Hernández Mompó always knew that he too wanted to be a painter. At the early age of thirteen he started attending the School of Arts and Crafts of Valencia, and two years later he enrolled at the city’s School of Fine Art.

After 1947, he abandoned the figurative cityscapes and landscapes indebted to academicism from his initial period and began to explore more avant-garde avenues. His new concerns encouraged him to travel abroad between 1954 and 1957, first to Paris, where he met Pablo Palazuelo and Eduardo Chillida among others, and then to Rome and finally to Holland. He then settled in Madrid in 1957. His practice was engaged with informalist painting, rendering abstract works in which images could only be intuited. In 1968 his work was chosen for the Venice Biennale where he obtained the UNESCO Prize.

His painting started to gain in luminosity and become more lyrical and playful in the 1970s as a result of his time spent in the Balearic Islands, especially in Mallorca where he moved in 1974. In 1973 he had travelled to New York, where he became better acquainted with US abstract painting. This experience led him to take a further step in his work, reducing his brushstroke until it became a sign and his lines became more elegant and delicate. From 1981 onwards, thanks to his ongoing research into light and colour with perspex, he ended up operating within the sphere of sculpture, producing pieces in metallic sheets although maintaining the signature elements of his previous work.

In 1984 he won the National Visual Arts Prize and in 1992 the Ministry of Culture posthumously awarded him the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.