Sin título (Untitled)

Juan Giralt was one of the pioneers of Madrid’s Nueva Figuración (New Figuration). Self-taught, a traveller and not connected to conventional academic routes, in his youth he explored various pictorial traditions, from informalism and the CoBrA group, until he achieved a radical and deeply personal synthesis that defined his mature work in the 1990s.

During the 1970s, alongside artists such as Luis Gordillo, Darío Villalba and José Luis Alexanco, he promoted a critical renewal of painting within spaces such as the Vandrés Gallery, which became a veritable aesthetic and social laboratory for New Figuration. Influenced by British pop art and groups such as the Chicago Imagists, Giralt developed a hybrid language in which the geometric and the gestural, the ironic and the lyrical merge naturally. In works such as those displayed in his legendary exhibition Papeles, recortables y collages (Paper, Cut-Outs and Collages) at Vandrés Gallery in 1974, there is a deliberate, postmodern break with the pictorial canon: automatism, distorted geometries, collages of cut-out paper and a radical colour palette that oscillated between the acidic and the sensual.

Raúl Martínez Arranz