José Antonio Fernandez Muro

Madrid, España, 1920-2014

            Due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, José Antonio Fernández Muro moved to Argentina with his family when he was barely 18 years old. His first training took place in the workshop of the Catalan painter Vicente Puig, a center of attraction for many Argentine artists during the 1930s, where he consolidated what would become a vital relationship with painting. Even though, in his beginnings, his production fell into the genres of still life and portraiture, many of which were exhibited in his first individual exhibition at the mythical Witcomb Gallery in 1944, his work would forcefully turn to experimentation and abstraction as a result of his encounter with the currents of non-figurative art emerging as dominant at that time. Under the guidance of Aldo Pellegrini, and together with the artists who were part of the Grupo de Artistas Modernos – Tomás Maldonado, Enio Iommi, Sarah Grilo, and Lidy Prati, among others, – his work traveled abroad and came into contact with the concrete trends of the time. 

            Without the dogmatic character of his colleagues' postulations, Fernández Muro bet on a poetics of pure visuality influenced by the geometrizing radiations of his contemporaries. Thus, the production of those times played loosely with the logic of the recurrences and patterns of abstract painting, introducing expressive colors, and even using geometric forms such as circles and lines as constructive principles. At the end of the 50s, his work traveled internationally, winning him awards from both the Guggenheim Museum and the Di Tella Institute. Fernández Muro then moved permanently to New York, where he settled with his wife and colleague, Sarah Grilo. In his 1960s production, it is possible to trace the impact of the new urban environment on his work. Many of his pieces allow us to observe how the geometric forms of yesteryear were transmuted into city elements, such as manhole covers and grates, footprints on the pavement, and rows of pennies or stamps. 

            These works, intervened by objects of reality directly, products of the frottage technique and the aluminum foil in relief, emphasize Fernández-Muro's relationship with the then popular American pop and critically reflect on the limits of pure abstraction. Back to Spain and intermittently partaking in the Parisian scene, the artist returns to more expressive color modulations and a fluid geometry, increasingly more personal and lyrical. His trajectory, in short, allows us to see the transformations of and debates on painting throughout the 20th century.