About the artist:

Trained at the Valencia Art College Genovés was always an inquiring painter, concerned both with the need to renovate Spanish art and also with the function of art and the artist in society. His firm conviction that art was transforming, and his concern for his environment lead him to join several important movements in the post war Spanish art scene: Los Siete (The Seven) 1949, Parpallós (1956) and Hondo (1960). It was in this last group that presented a new approach to figurative painting opposing Informalism, that Genovés developed a style of painting that was expressionist and provocative. During the sixties Genovés had a creative crisis which he got over quickly. He became very involved in the opposition movements of the time against the Franco regime. He started to consider two subjects in his painting: the "individual" which he represented through collage and "the crowd" which he painted in flat colours and in a cinematographic style. The latter style, which developed into political realism with a strong underlying current of social compromise and criticism of the dictatorship, was achieved by the manipulation of images from the media. In the eighties Genovés started a new period in his painting in which he focused on the urban landscape, reducing it to a chromatic range of greys, blues and ochres to make up "spaces of loneliness". In recent years he has investigated, through his work, the static movement in painting and "the crowd" has become a reference to talk about the problem of painting and visual rhythm. He has been awarded the Honourable Mention at the XXXIII Venice Biennial in 1966, the Gold Medal at the VI San Marino International Biennial in 1967, the International Marzotto Prize in 1968, the Spanish National Art Prize in 1984, the Valencian Art Prize in 2002, the Gold medal for merit in the Arts by the Spanish Culture Department in 2005.