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José Guerrero
(Granada, 1914 – Barcelona, 1991)
Comienzo
1983
oil on canvas
178.2 x 130.2 cm
Inv. no. 582
BBVA Collection Spain
Together with Esteban Vicente (1903-2001), the other Spanish member of the American abstract expressionist school, Guerrero is one of Spain’s most international artists.
After training in Madrid and sojourns in Paris and Rome, where he met his future wife Roxanne Pollock, in 1949 Guerrero moved to New York, where
Abstract Expressionism
This contemporary painting movement emerged within the field of abstraction in the 1940s in the United States, from where it spread worldwide. Rooted in similar premises and postulates as Surrealism, the Abstract Expressionist artists regarded the act of painting as a spontaneous and unconscious activity, a dynamic bodily action divested of any kind of prior planning. The works belonging to this movement are defined by the use of pure, vibrant primary colours that convey a profound sense of freedom. The movement’s main pioneers were, among others, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and Hans Hoffman (1880-1966). Leading Spanish exponents of the movement are Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) and José Guerrero (1914-1991), who lived for some time in New York City, where they were in first-hand contact with the many artistic innovations taking place there around that time.
was just coming into its own. He soon joined the movement, and was particularly active in the abstract style known as
colour field painting
a style of abstract painting associated with Abstract Expressionism in which artists work with large fields of colour, endowing their paintings with a mystical aura. Practitioners of colour field painting include Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still.
.
In the 1960s he returned to Spain, where he found a favourable climate to continue developing his vibrant palette. His creative process focused on experimentation with painting itself, through which he reflects his personal experience in the form of colour: “Colour spreads, it does not stop,” as he said in 1988.
This work reflects Guerrero’s vitality and love for paint, a liquid colour applied with free-flowing brushwork. He worked in a very bright chromatic range in an unmistakably Spanish tone, with a luminosity characteristic of the hot climate of his native Andalusia.
For Guerrero, colour has a subjective association that he frequently deciphered through psychoanalysis —which he underwent for four years— and that remits to his childhood, to nature, to sensuality... always accompanied and accentuated through black, the central focus of his series
Comienzo
, or
beginning
in English
.
In his own words, black is a reflection he perceives “in people, in the landscape, in loneliness,” very different to the black of the
El Paso
group, because here he is talking about his youth cloaked in mourning and the tragic death of his father and his siblings. Black contrasts with the large areas of yellows, reds, pinks and blues, the colours most frequent in his palette and also present in this series.
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