8 essential Spanish artists from the 80s

Spanish art in the 1980s was a period of creative explosion that would set the benchmark for the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. The RedCollectors team has selected 8 reference artists from this creative moment, from all over Spain and belonging to various generations.

Jose Manuel Sicily

José María Sicilia (Madrid, Spain, 1954) is one of the most important artistic figures of Spanish painting in the 1980s. He abandoned his studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid to move to Paris in 1980, where he would begin his artistic career.

Sicilia's work is based on the investigation of form, space and light through pictorial abstraction. It has a recognized expressionist character, in addition to delving into the monochrome of white.

During his career, the artist received the National Prize for Plastic Arts from the Ministry of Culture of Spain in 1989.

The artist's work is represented in museums such as the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He currently resides between Paris and Sóller, where he has created a foundation dedicated to young artists. In 2015, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.

Juan Uslé

Juan Uslé (Santander, Spain, 1954) is one of the most prominent Spanish artists. His work is recognized as one of the most evocative of his generation, with a personal style linked to abstraction.

During the 1980s, Uslé's painting evolved from an abstract expressionist style indebted to Willem de Kooning to fascinating, dark maritime landscapes. These paintings are a way of describing his solitary arrival in New York and how he established his inner identity there.

His work changed in the 1990s, after two years of residence in this city. Romantic references to the landscape and any trace of expressionism then disappeared from his work, to develop an extremely personal language of simultaneous styles.

From this moment on, his works are characterized by their unique, intense and non-naturalistic colors, and by the alternation of gesture and geometry, sobriety and baroque, dynamism and immobility, characteristics that can appear alone or together with their opposite, in all possible proportions.

Uslé's work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in both Europe and the United States, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany, among others. His participation in Documenta 9 Kassel (1992), the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 or the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2002, among others.

Miquel Barcelo

Miquel Barceló (Mallorca, Spain, 1957) is a contemporary Spanish painter and sculptor. His work is known for its experimental exploration. It involves elements such as decomposition, light and the natural landscape.

His work - in a neo-expressionist style - is created from various materials, surfaces and textures. The artist explores matter following a process of constant transformation and metamorphosis. Whether in painting, drawing, ceramics or bronze, his pieces narrate physical behavior, the passage of time or decomposition.

When creating, Barceló is inspired by a kind of desire, imagination or ritual driven by the interaction with time and memory, the sea and the sky. His pieces are understood as visible traces, offering at the same time the breaking of artistic conventions. For the artist, to destroy is to create.

His international career began in the early 1980s, when he participated in the São Paulo Biennial (1981) and the Documenta in Kassel (1982). In 1986 he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts, and since then his work has been recognised with the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts (2003) and the Sorolla Prize of the Hispanic Society of America in New York (2007). Barceló's work is represented in the most important contemporary art museums in the world. These include the MoMA in New York, USA; the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; and the Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, Spain.

Cristina Iglesias

Cristina Iglesias (1956, San Sebastian, Spain) lives and works in Torrelodones, Madrid, Spain

Cristina Iglesias is considered one of the most innovative artists of recent years at an international level. She has a very defined style both in sculpture and in photography and in silkscreen images. At first glance, the work appears to be a photograph of her sculptural installations, when in fact it represents miniature models of the artist's works. With this, Cristina Iglesias intends to explore a space within another and invite the viewer to enter, seeking a physical and psychological experience. In this way, the work becomes a dead end to which additional narrative information is incorporated with frameworks formed by letters and words.

She has been awarded the Grosse Kunstpreis Prize (Berlin) and her work is present in collections such as the Tate Gallery (London), CAPC - Museum of Contemporary Art (Bordeaux), Guggenheim Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Bilbao), MACBA - Museum of Contemporary Art (Barcelona), among others.

Luis Gordillo

Luis Gordillo (Seville, Spain, 1934) is a renowned Spanish abstract artist. He began his artistic training at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Seville.

Among the artist's various lines of research, informalism stands out. His interpretation of Pop Art in the seventies also stands out. In his works, one can distinguish the importance of the series and repetition, as well as the link between thought, experience and expression. Part of his work is related to the tradition of documentary photography and popular cultures linked to graphic design.

Gordillo's artistic career has been recognised on numerous occasions. In 2012 he was named Favourite Son of Andalusia; in 2008 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Castilla-La Mancha at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca; in 2007 he was awarded the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, the equivalent in painting to the Cervantes Prize; in 2004 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid; in 1996 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts by the Ministry of Culture; in 1991 he received the Andalusian Prize for Plastic Arts; in 1981 he received the National Prize for Plastic Arts. His work belongs to important national and international collections.

Jose Manuel Broto

José Manuel Broto (Zaragoza, 1949) is a Spanish abstract artist. He founded the Trama group (Barcelona, ​​1976), a novel and radical collective of political, artistic and literary intervention in the Spanish avant-garde of the mid-1970s.

Colour, expression and poetry are common elements in Broto's painting. The artist defends a type of painting that goes beyond the gestural, in opposition to the formalism defended by American Abstract Expressionism. His painting is characterized by contrasts and lyricism, as well as the dialogue between organic and geometric forms.

The work of the artist from Zaragoza is present in important collections around the world. In Spain, the following stand out: CAAM (Atlantic Centre for Modern Art), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; the Testimonio Collection of La Caixa, Barcelona; the Argentaria Collection, Madrid; the Banco de España Collection, Madrid; among others. And international collections include the Ateneum Museum, Helsinki; the PREUSSAG Collection, Hannover; the Tore A. Holm Collection, Stockholm; the FNAC (Fond National d'Art Contemporain), Paris; the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam; among others.

Jose Maria Yturralde

José María Yturralde (Cuenca, Spain, 1942) is a renowned Spanish contemporary artist. The artist holds a Bachelor's and Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia; he is a Full Academician of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos Valencia; Professor of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia and winner of the 2020 National Prize for Plastic Arts.

The artist's work is characterized by technological, geometric and kinetic abstraction. An approach that is close to op art and minimalism. The artist represents impossible figures, light, precise in color and simulating movement.

Behind the image there are hidden approaches to art and science. A humanistic and mathematical approach, where the human condition is the origin of artistic creation.

The artist's work is included in major public and private collections, both national and international, such as (selection): Fundación Juan March, Palma de Mallorca; Fundación Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca; Generalitat Valenciana; Hasting Fundation, New York; IVAM. Institut Valenciá d'Art Modern, Valencia; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States; Musée de Verck sur Mer, France; Musée Municipel de l'Estampe, Roquebrune - Cap - Martin, France; Museo Ciudad de Valencia, Cortes Valencianas; Museu d'Art Contemporani dels Països Catalans, Banyoles; Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca; Museum of Contemporary Art in Ibiza; Museum of Contemporary Art in Seville; Museum of Contemporary Art of the Espiritu Santo in Brazil; Museum of Modern Art in Lanzarote; Museum of Alto Aragón, Huesca; Museum of Fine Arts in Valencia; Museum of Fine Arts in Vitoria; Museum of the City of Valencia; Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid; Novgorod State Museum, Russia; MNCARS - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; National Museum of Wroklaw, Poland; Popular Museum of Contemporary Art of Villafamés, Castellón; Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia; Patio Herreriano. Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art, Valladolid; PR Norman Collection, New Orleans; Complutense University of Madrid; Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Miguel Angel Campano

Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948) is one of the leading figures of the so-called renewal of Spanish painting, which took place in the 1980s and in which Ferrán García Sevilla, José Manuel Broto, José María Sicilia and Miquel Barceló also participated.

The tension between abstraction and figuration and the contrast between emptiness and fullness reaches a decisive experimental component in his work. To achieve a break with style, Campano revises the pictorial tradition and takes as a starting point some themes and works of French painting, by artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Nicolas Poussin or Paul Cézanne. With them, Campano undertakes the construction of a radicalized aesthetic, where some of the most energetic lines of the minimalist tradition and the gestural variants of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell converge, together with allusions to the historical avant-gardes linked to Constructivism and Suprematism.

Campano's work - National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1996 - becomes a privileged place of experimentation and transgression, which permanently questions painting from within painting itself. From 1991, the year in which this exhibition begins, this evolution can be seen more clearly.