MANOLO MILLARES SALL (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1936 - Madrid, 1972).Untitled, 1957.Ink and

MANOLO MILLARES SALL (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1936 - Madrid, 1972).
Untitled, 1957.
Ink and watercolour on card.
Provenance: Vivanco family.
Signed, dated and dedicated to the family of Luis Felipe Vivanco.
Size: 9 x 15 cm; 34,5 x 41 cm (frame).
This work corresponds to the period when Millares, already settled in Madrid, founded the group "El paso". It was common for the artist to give his closest acquaintances Christmas cards that he created himself. In this particular case the work is a Christmas card dedicated to Luis Felipe Vivanco. Spanish architect and poet who focused his poetic production on the composition of avant-garde pieces, which led him to become friends with important personalities such as Rafael Alberti and Pablo Neruda. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he devoted himself to the propagandist poetry of the Franco regime, collaborating in newspapers such as "Arriba España" and "Jerarquía".
Co-founder of the El Paso group in 1957, Millares began his career in the Canary Islands, imbued with the surrealist atmosphere developed around Óscar Domínguez. His work revolves around two essential concerns, which in reality are one and the same: surrealism with its interest in the subconscious and the primitive, and the deep roots of disappeared cultures, specifically those of the Guanches. Self-taught, Millares made his individual debut in 1945, at the Círculo Mercantil in Las Palmas, and after four years experimenting with surrealism he decided to focus his work definitively on abstraction. In 1951 he took part in the I Bienal Hispanoamericana de arte, held in Madrid, which marked his definitive encounter with contemporary artistic reality. That same year he held his first exhibition on the peninsula, at the Jardín galleries in Barcelona. From then on he held exhibitions and participated in group shows in Spain, Cuba, Brazil, France, Germany and the United States, among other countries. In 1955 his work took a fundamental turn, which would mark a before and after in his language, and which took place around the discovery of sackcloth as a support. Thus, he left behind the works influenced by the pictographs of the Canary Islands, the result of his interest in surrealism and archaeology, and began to use sackcloth as an element that he added to the surface of the painting, together with other materials such as sand, ceramics or wood. For the artist, the sackcloth is an evocation of the cloth with which the Guanche mummies, discovered by Millares in the Canary Island Museum, were wrapped. It was also in 1955 that he settled in Madrid; there, under the influence of Burri, sackcloth became a support, the essential element of his works. Two years later he joined the El Paso group, in which he played a decisive role. Millares exploited the possibilities of sackcloth to the full, tearing, tearing, perforating, sewing and re-sewing it, thus extolling the value of the material as a vehicle of expression. His palette is reduced and becomes sober, with the ochre of the sackcloth and the colours black, red and white predominating. Abstraction is replaced by a recognisable figuration and the work acquires, even through the materials it is made of, a social and moral nuance. Until the mid-sixties black was the main colour in his works, but from 1964-65 onwards white took on an increasingly important role, as can be seen in his "Antropofaunas" and "Neandertalios".
Manolo Millares is currently represented in numerous museums all over the world, such as the MOMA in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.