1935, Toledo, Spain
Crowd (El Tumulto), 1966
Oil on canvas, 197 х 150 cm
Acquisition: Gift
Reference: 01855
Biography
He was born in Toledo and studied in Madrid, where in 1957 he was a founder member of the group El Paso, which was hostile to the Franco regime. His work at this time had developed from Social Realism to aggressively expressive abstraction, but in the 1960s he reintroduced representational elements, with overtones of humor and satire, through which he expressed human alienation in the modern world: ‘The protagonist of my work, man, is a clear denunciation of industrial society, which enslaves our urban existence and reduces the human being to pure functionalism, incapable of the most elementary co-existence and brotherhood.’ Canogar has travelled and exhibited widely and is regarded as one of the leading Spanish painters of his generation. In 1971 he won the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Bienal.
source: Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art (1999)
