Born 1935 in Toledo, Spain. Lives and works in Madrid.

After the Spanish Civil War and a period of transition, Rafael Canogar and his family took up residence in Madrid in 1944. He began his training with painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, with whom he mastered a figurative language inspired by the work of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.

In 1954 Canogar began to experiment with abstraction and informalism, motivated by Michel Tapié’s call for a collective art phenomenon. His canvases, increasingly monochromatic, sought to achieve a balance between form and matter, between formal and informal painting. Within this trajectory he formed the group El Paso (1957–1960) alongside Luis Feito, Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera and Antonio Saura among others, which ushered in a key phase in the modernization of the Spanish avant-garde.

ollowing a trip to the USA in the early 1960s, and a peak in his international recognition in 1964, Canogar abandoned informalism, which had become assimilated by Francisco Franco’s regime as ‘official’ art.

His painting, The Punishment 1969 typifies a key aspect of Rafael Canogar’s practice from the 1960s. Owning the vocabulary of narrative figuration, which had begun to spread among the Spanish avant-garde of the time, his work invoked the aesthetics of commercial culture and of the mass media. Yet, in contrast with his contemporaries (including Equipo Crónica and Equipo Realidad), his subjects did not exist within an iconographic superstructure, but were deeply rooted in social realities.

Using wood and polyester reinforced fibreglass, Canogar escaped the boundaries of the canvas adding three-dimensionality, volume and flesh to his figures. The Punishment represents a man being beaten by a policeman, which would not have been an unfamiliar scene in the late 1960s. The disturbing vignette, which physically invades the viewer’s domain, was interpreted as a wakeup call to engage with the social unrest that defined those turbulent years in Francoist Spain.

Written by Sofia Gotti?, September 2015

Rafael Canogar was born in Toledo in 1935. The painter and sculptor Rafael Canogar is counted among the proponents of expressionism and abstract painting. His works often deal with socially critical and political issues.

In 1957, Canogar founded the group ‘El Paso’ in Madrid along with other artists, whose works showed an influence of the ‘Action Painting.’ Until 1960, the group propagated the informal (official) art. From 1965 to 1966, Canogar was a professor at the Mills College in Oakland. In 1972, he won the first prize of the IX Biennale of Sao Paulo, Brazil.