JUAN GENOVÉS
Valencia, Spain, 1930
Director of Fundación Botín Art Workshop in 1994

Detenido (Deteined), 1974
Pencil and colored pencil on paper
58.4 × 78.8 cm
Acquired in 2008

Juan Genovés was a restless painter, concerned both with the need to renew Spanish art and with the role of art and the artist in society. His strong conviction in transformative art, committed to its environment, led him to join some of the most significant collectives in postwar Spain: Los Siete (1949), Parpallós (1956), and Hondo (1960). In this last group, which proposed new figurative approaches in contrast to informalism, Genovés developed a painting style that was both expressionist and provocative.

In the 1960s, following a brief artistic crisis and a deep engagement with movements opposing the Franco regime, he began exploring two themes: the “solitary individual,” initially realized as a relief-like “collage,” and the “crowd,” treated with flat inks and plastic structures with a cinematic quality. Over time, the latter approach evolved into a distinctive political realism of strong social critique, created through the manipulation of images supplied by mass media.