Joaquín Michavila

(Alcora, Castellón, 1926-2016)

De horizonte

ca. 1988

mixed media on paper

48.5 x 66.5 cm

Inv. no. 2763

BBVA Collection Spain


Michavila began his career in the fifties as part of the group Los Siete. He was also a founding member of the Parpalló and
. He was also a founding member of the
movement, promoted by the critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni. By contrast with the diversity of Parpalló, all the members of this last group shared the same aesthetic approach, a combination of
and Kinetic Art, and above all the same quest, to find the relationship between science and art.

Michavila took part in the analytical trend of the sixties and seventies, basing his work on compositional rigour, the study of diagonals, and superimposed planes of colour. His is a cerebral type of painting, which he executes after a long period of reflection during which he experiments with forms and establishes a dialogue between space, form and colour. Later on he adopted a much more gestural aesthetic, within the ambit ofabstract Informalismo.

His career as an artist and teacher was recognised in 1975 when he was made a member of the San Carlos Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Valencia.

This composition, forming a pair with another work also in the BBVA Collection, exemplifies to perfection the evolution Michavila’s work underwent from the 1980s onwards, when he left aside pure geometry to explore more emotional experiences, rendered in a brand of expressionist abstraction with vague references to landscape.