It is not easy to classify the style of this painter born in Andalusia within a specific movement. Belonging to the Generation of ‘27 and a key member of the Spanish , he borrowed from different movements as he saw fit. Worth mentioning as a unique feature of his practice is the geometrisation of the form in which the artist instils great lyricism.

Manuel Ángeles Ortiz started training in Granada, the city where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence and where he became friends with the painter Ismael de la Serna (1898-1968) and the poet Federico García Lorca, in whose theatre project La Barraca he collaborated. In the 1920s he travelled to Paris with a letter of reference from Manuel de Falla. There he got in touch with artists like Hernando Viñes (1904-1993), Joan Miró (1893-1983) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), with whom he became close friends. From that moment onwards, his genre painting, made in an academic style, evolved towards principles influenced by and Post-.

In the 1950s, his practice, which includes repetitions, variations and organised plays of both colour and light, became more lyrical and playful. This is the case of the painting at hand, highly representative of his late period, which belongs to his series Cabezas (Heads), started in 1957 and extended until 1982.

According to Juan Manuel Bonet, in 1964, the year of his marriage with Brigitte Badin, Ortiz began to use his wife’s face for these female heads with geometric hairdos crowned by a flower. In 1972 he started to paint his multiple heads, a variable number of sketchily rendered heads in turn fragmented by the use of a central line into an area of shadow and another one of light, a recourse injecting the work with considerable dynamic energy. The symmetry of representation and a paring down to essentials are patent, as well as the harmonies created in ochre and earthy tones.