Description of the work

The work Menina (Helene Series) is by the artist Manolo Valdés. Collage engraving technique. Measures 65 x 48.5 cm. Numbering and printing 8/10. PVP € 3,300. Espai Cavallers Gallery, Lleida.

(Valencia, 1942) Spanish painter and sculptor. Manolo Valdés Blasco was born on March 8, 1942 in the city of Valencia. He attended high school in the Dominican school in his hometown. In 1957, after completing these studies, he entered the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos. The excessively academic training that was given there should not satisfy him too much since, only two years later, he left this institution to devote himself entirely to painting.

Already in the first works executed shortly after leaving the School -formally indebted to an agonizing abstract expressionism-, the young Valdés demonstrated a creative capacity and a technical-formal ability out of the ordinary. In 1962 he presented a set of works in this style at the Galeria Nebli in Madrid, where he had his first solo exhibition.

SIXTY YEARS
Also, at the beginning of the sixties, Valdés, together with the artists Gorris, Juan Antonio Toledo and Rafael Solbes, among others, and the art historian Tomás Llorens, formed the group Estampa Popular de Valencia. At a time when the country, albeit timidly, was opening up to the market economy, the group advocated redefining the role of art and the artist in the framework of this Spain in full transformation process. For them, new artistic expressions, in addition to echoing this nascent socio-economic situation, had to take into account language and visual resources from the mass media.

The Chronicle Team

In 1964 Manolo Valdés, Rafael Solbes and Juan Antonio Toledo split from Estampa Popular and formed the Chronicle Team. A year later Toledo would abandon the project and it would remain, until the death of Solbes, in 1981, in the hands of the first two. The Chronicle Team, influenced by the debates generated within the Popular Print, emerged as a critique of individualism and the romantic image of the genius artist. That is why the idea of ​​dissolving the personality of artists under a collective and, at the same time, anonymous name.

For more information on the work Menina (Série Helene) by the artist Manolo Valdés, at the Espai Cavallers gallery, Lleida.