Growth, c. 1951

After immigrating to the United States during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Vicente irrupted onto the New York art scene at the end of the 1940s. His abstract art was quickly recognised by the members of the incipient New York School, who invited him to take part in the group’s seminal exhibitions. His sensual, serene, luminous and well-balanced painting established him as one of the outstanding members of this school’s first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Growth (1951) condenses the creative, pictorial texture of Vicente’s work. With his warm chromatic range and vigorous lines, he combines colourful figures – bringing to mind a certain kind of geometry – with black strokes and lines that evoke the realms of drawing and rational or ‘reasonable’ abstraction that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century.