Antonio Suárez

Gijón, 1923 – Madrid, 2013

Antonio Suárez is an essential figure of 20th-century Spanish abstract painting and one of the artists who led the renewal of the visual arts in post-war Spain. After his first contacts with painting and an early figurative phase, he moved towards abstraction and developed a language deeply concerned with matter, texture, light and compositional balance.

In 1957 he took part in founding El Paso, together with Antonio Saura, Luis Feito, Manuel Millares, Rafael Canogar and other artists, becoming one of the protagonists of the break with the traditional artistic models of the time. His Informalist painting is characterised by dense, worked surfaces, restrained tones and particular attention to the expressive possibilities of matter.

Throughout his career he represented Spain at various international events and was a constant presence in major exhibitions and collections. His work is a first-rate testimony to the consolidation of Spanish abstraction and to the profound transformation of pictorial language during the second half of the 20th century.