Rafael Canogar

Spanish painter and sculptor born in Toledo in 1935. A disciple of Vázquez Díaz, he began by imitating the cubist style of Picasso and Braque and the surrealism of Joan Miró, until evolving towards informal abstraction. In 1957 he became one of the members of the El Paso group together with Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura, Luis Feito, Manuel Rivera, Pablo Serrano, Juana Francés and Antonio Suárez and in 1960 he participated in the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York alongside exponents of the young avant-gardes. He began by combining oil with different types of tempera until later incorporating photography. In the early 1960s, he abandoned the informal movement to approach reality and describe it, aware of the strong influence it exerts in the media. His palette reduces chromaticism to plays of whites and blacks and gradually returns to the abstraction he discovered in Paris. In his technique, Canogar evolves from the almost exclusive use of oil on canvas to the use of other materials such as polyester, acrylic, wood and fiberglass, which he uses to compose his collages and artworks in which these mixed techniques combine objects of diverse nature, creating as a result works that are half sculpture and half painting. His figures are stripped of identity markers so that the anonymity of the masses is the true protagonist of his work. In 1971 he won the Prize at the São Paulo Biennial and in 1983 he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts.