MANUEL SALINAS MILÁ (Seville, 1940-2021). Lot n° 39

MANUEL SALINAS MILÁ (Seville, 1940- 2021). "Salinas". Oil on paper glued to board. Signed in the lower right-hand corner. Measurements: 50 x 65 cm; 71.5 x 89 cm (frame). A work of abstract aesthetics, where the author has used a pictorial language of open style, whose basic characteristic is the conception of the pictorial surface as a whole, as an open field, without limits and without hierarchy. Thus, as we see here, the pictorial forms, the fruit of experimentation, pure stain and gestural brushstrokes, are not limited to a composition but go beyond it, indicating to the spectator that they are forms, ideas or suggestions that go beyond the frontiers of the purely pictorial. A self-taught painter, Manuel Salinas is one of the leading representatives of Spanish abstraction in the last twenty-five years. His first exhibition dates from 1962, and from then on he exhibited his work in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Colombia, Sweden, the United States, Serbia, France, Greece, Bulgaria and Mexico. In 2003 two retrospectives were devoted to him, one in Seville, organised by the Caja San Fernando, and another travelling around Europe, with Sofia as the starting point, organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has works in the Reina Sofía Museum, the La Caixa Foundation, the Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Museums of Valladolid, Madrid and Tenerife, the Vázquez Díaz Museum and in the collections of the Bank of Spain, Olivetti, Argentaria, Endesa, BBV and Avianca (Barranquilla, Colombia). The artist also owns two works included in the book by the critic Francisco Calvo Serraller "Las cien mejores obras del siglo XX" (Madrid; TF and Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio, 2001).