Cuadro 1967, 1967
Millares’ arrival in mainland Spain in the fifties brought him into contact with the ‘black’ tradition of Castile and the Generation of ’98, which encouraged an artistic desire for destruction and the denial of space and matter. This acrylic on canvas clearly points to the artist’s final stage, achieved in the late sixties, where an insistent use of black and white sees large tonal masses traversing empty backgrounds, clearly identifying his work with the abstraction of Informalism. Millares incorporates painted burlap or sackcloth and turns it into a field of experimentation. In this case, the burlap is wrinkled and folded-in on itself to achieve an effect of powerful tension. The artist makes an ironic reference to the pictorial tradition of representation by using the word cuadro (picture) as the title.
Like most of Millares’ works, expressive gestures appeal to the unconscious, evoking fear, a sense of destruction and dark shadows that are both personal and collective. ‘With a life force – the ethical motor of any work of art – stimulated by the positive-negative action of reality, a new way of feeling flows through an unknown expressive matter’, as the artist explained in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1963.
Technical details
- Original title:
- Cuadro 1967
- Registration number:
- 0093
- Artist:
- Millares, Manolo
- Date created:
- 1967
- Date acquired:
- 1997
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. Government of Catalonia long-term loan
- Object type:
- Painting
- Media:
- Acrylic on canvas
- Dimensions:
- 25.5 x 35.3 cm (height x width)
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. Government of Catalonia long-term loan. National Collection of Art
- Copyright:
- © Manolo Millares, VEGAP, Barcelona
- It has accessibility resources:
- No
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
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