Rafael Canogar

Rafael Canogar - Ark

Biografía del Artista: Toledo, 1935. Rafael Canogar trained in Madrid, in the studio of the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, alongside fellow artists Cristino de Vera and Agustín Ibarrola. His beginnings are marked by an unquestionable following of the cubism of Picasso and Braque and the surrealism of Joan Miró, until he evolved towards informalist abstraction. After taking classes with models at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, he participated in the creation of the El Paso group (1957-1959) with a first exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery alongside Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura, Luis Feito, Manuel Rivera, Pablo Serrano, Juana Francés and Antonio Suárez. Technically, his beginnings are a combination of oils with different types of tempera, to which he would later incorporate photography. At the beginning of the sixties he abandoned the informalist movement to approach reality, reduced chromatism to plays of black and white and gradually returned to the abstraction he had discovered in Paris. His technique continued to evolve through experimentation with materials such as polyester, acrylic, wood and fibreglass, with which he composed his characteristic collages, works with a vocation for sculpture. His career as an artist has been rewarded with the applause of the public and critics in numerous solo exhibitions and being one of the names included in collections such as those of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca, MoMA in New York, the Banco Santander Central Hispano Collection and the Vatican Museums in Rome, among many others. In addition to having received countless awards such as the National Prize for Plastic Arts (Madrid, 1982), the Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel la Católica (Madrid, 1991) or the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts of the Spanish State in 2003.