Lucio Muñoz

Lucio Muñoz (born December 27, 1929 in Madrid, died May 24, 1998 ditto) was a Spanish artist. He was the son of Lucio Munoz, a businessman, and Nicolasa Martinez. He was the youngest of five brothers.

Lucio Muñoz worked with different materials, like burnt paper, wood, etc. He pierced, bent, made cuts in the canvas, like informalist artists. His works are in informal colours, but black-dominated. At the end of his style was less aggressive, because he used other materials.

In 1964 Galería Juana Mordó was opened. He belonged to the associated group of painters from the moment of its foundation until 1991.

Lucio Muñoz was one of the greatest exponents of Spanish informalism during the second half of the 20th century. He was born in Madrid in 1929 and studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. After his decisive journey to Paris in 1956, he entered the terrain of abstract art, to which he remained faithful throughout the rest of his career. It was at that time that he discovered wood, which, from that moment onwards, was to become the vehicle, scratched, burnt, carved or mouldy, for paintings rich in poetic connotations and highly attentive to the expressiveness of nature.

The proposed selection of works gathers together around thirty medium and large format paintings which cover fundamental moments in Lucio Muñoz’s creative career. They represent the decade of the 50’s, with his first, still figurative, works and his crucial discovery of wood, the acknowledged 60’s during which this discovery was consolidated in dark paintings with a tragic atmosphere, the 70’s, full of strange organic shapes and supernatural landscapes, the 80’s when nature took possession of his paintings like a whirlwind and, lastly, the 90’s when Lucio Muñoz reached his peak as an artist and offered serene, noble and almost naked panels.

Following the painter’s death in 1998, the critics highlighted the coherence and solidity of his work, referring to him as: "the greatest exponent of naturalistic abstraction", "the painter with poetic imagination" and "the master of abstract expressionism".

External links

* [http://www.luciomunoz.com/home.asp Home page (in Spanish)]