20th Century Filipino-Spanish

Fernado Zóbel is a major exponent of Spanish twentieth-century abstraction.

He spent his childhood and early youth between the Philippines, Spain and Switzerland. In 1946 he moved to the US to study Humanities at Harvard University. There he frequented art circles and reaffirmed his idea of devoting his life to art and painting. In 1952 he had to return to the Philippines to join the family company. There he combined his work in the family business with art making, collecting, teaching and researching while also taking an active role in Filipino cultural life.

An exhibition by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) which he had seen in 1955 led to a radical shift in his practice, up to then defined by a genre painting approach. Rothko works left an indelible print on Zóbel, who then embarked on a search of his own abstract language. That endeavour led to his first nonfigurative series: Saetas (1957-1959). That year he travelled to Spain where he discovered the work of Spanish abstract artists at Galería Fernando Fe.

Zóbel reached his maturity as an artist in the 1960s, with a body of work of extremely subtle abstract paintings. In spite of their apparent spontaneity, his paintings are the result of a painstaking process of analysis of his surrounding reality, a process reflected in his notebooks. Taken together, all the notebooks he used throughout his lifetime can be viewed as a life and aesthetic diary of sorts.

In 1961 he settled definitively in Spain. In the mid-1950s Zóbel began to purchase works by Spain’s leading practitioners of abstract art, and this collection would later be the foundations for the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, which he co-founded in Cuenca together with Gustavo Torner (1925) and Gerardo Rueda (1926-1996). Opened in 1966 in an iconic building—the famous Casas Colgadas—and praised by Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA New York, the museum officialised Spain’s opening up to abstract art. The so-called formed around the museum, which soon became a meeting point for many artists.

Zóbel spent his life travelling tirelessly to visit museums and exhibitions, which were a crucial source of inspiration for his work. He died unexpectedly in 1984 while visiting Rome.

Works by Fernando Zóbel are to be found in the collections of major art institutions, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Fundación Juan March in Madrid; Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao; Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; and the Ateneo Art Gallery in Manila.