{"title":"Rafael Canogar","description":"\u003cp\u003eRafael Canogar (born 1935, Toledo) is a Spanish painter and sculptor who emerged in the late 1950s as one of the founding members of El Paso, the Madrid-based group whose commitment to gestural abstraction and material intensity placed them in dialogue with Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism while asserting a distinctly Spanish voice in the postwar international avant-garde.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis early paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s developed a dense, impastoed surface language rooted in the expressive possibilities of paint as matter. During the 1960s, Canogar’s practice underwent a radical transformation: moving away from pure abstraction, he began constructing three-dimensional figures in wood, polyester and reinforced fibreglass that projected directly into the viewer’s space. These \u003cem\u003eConstrucciones\u003c\/em\u003e — bodies bound, restrained, partially covered or held within rectangular supports — carried an explicit political charge, addressing the violence, detention and collective suffering of life under Franco’s Spain without recourse to documentary realism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis exhibition \u003cem\u003eConstrucciones 1968–1975\u003c\/em\u003e at A.R.C. 2, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1975) brought this body of work to an international audience and subsequently travelled to Lund, Høvikodden and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. From the late 1970s onwards, Canogar returned to painting, developing a lyrical and increasingly luminous practice that continued to engage with the human figure. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 1982. His work is held in major collections in Spain and internationally.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/rafael-canogar.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}