MANOLO MILLARES SALL (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,... Lot 4

MANOLO MILLARES SALL (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1936 - Madrid, 1972). Untitled. Ink on paper. Signed in the lower right corner. Size: 31 x 24 cm; 46 x 38 cm (frame). Co-founder of the El Paso group in 1957, Millares began his career in the Canary Islands, imbued with the surrealist atmosphere developed around Óscar Domínguez. His work revolves around two essential concerns, which in reality are one and the same: surrealism with its interest in the subconscious and the primitive, and the deep roots of disappeared cultures, specifically those of the Guanches. Self-taught, Millares made his individual debut in 1945, at the Círculo Mercantil in Las Palmas, and after four years experimenting with surrealism he decided to focus his work definitively on abstraction. In 1951 he took part in the I Bienal Hispanoamericana de arte, held in Madrid, which marked his definitive encounter with contemporary artistic reality. That same year he held his first exhibition on the peninsula, at the Jardín galleries in Barcelona. From then on he held exhibitions and participated in group shows in Spain, Cuba, Brazil, France, Germany and the United States, among other countries. In 1955 his work took a fundamental turn, which would mark a before and after in his language, and which took place around the discovery of sackcloth as a support. Thus, he left behind the works influenced by the pictographs of the Canary Islands, the result of his interest in surrealism and archaeology, and began to use sackcloth as an element that he added to the surface of the painting, together with other materials such as sand, ceramics or wood. For the artist, the sackcloth is an evocation of the cloth with which the Guanche mummies, discovered by Millares in the Canary Island Museum, were wrapped. It was also in 1955 that he settled in Madrid; there, under the influence of Burri, sackcloth became a support, the essential element of his works. Two years later he joined the El Paso group, in which he played a decisive role. Millares exploited the possibilities of sackcloth to the full, tearing, tearing, perforating, sewing and re-sewing it, thus extolling the value of the material as a vehicle of expression. His palette is reduced and becomes sovereign, with the ochre of the sackcloth and the colors black, red and white predominating. Abstraction is replaced by a recognizable figuration and the work acquires, even through the materials it is made of, a social and moral nuance. Until the mid-sixties black was the main color in his works, but from 1964-65 onwards white took on an increasingly important role, as can be seen in his "Antropofaunas" and "Neandertalios". Manolo Millares is currently represented in numerous museums all over the world, such as the MOMA in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.