JOSÉ MANUEL BROTO GIMENO (Zaragoza, 1949). "Composition", 1986. Acrylic on canvas. Signed and dated on the back. Certificate of José Manuel Broto. Measurements: 195 x 135 cm. Broto's influences led him to an abstraction close to artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell or Sam Francis, based on lyricism and, in some cases, the sublime. The path opened up by Antoni Tàpies, who shunned the conceptual to practise a material art based on the essentiality of painting, was fundamental for him. Thus, in this work, the artist uses an abstract language based on irregular geometry, free both in its layout and in its textures and colours. The pictorial forms are the fruit of duality, in that they are resolved by means of a thought-out composition and also by experimentation. The result is an image that transcends, indicating to the spectator that it is about forms, ideas or suggestions that go beyond the frontiers of the purely pictorial. He is an Aragonese painter framed within the new abstraction of the seventies, and is considered one of the most significant figures of contemporary Spanish painting. José Manuel Broto studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zaragoza, and exhibited his work for the first time in 1968, showing a style in line with constructivism. In 1972 he moved to Barcelona, where he founded the group Trama. However, after the dissolution of the group, Broto moved into a language close to abstract expressionism, incorporating a landscape of primitive nature into his work. He showed these new works in his first solo exhibition in Paris, held in 1984 at the Adrien Maeght gallery. Since 1985 he has lived and worked in Paris. Settled in Paris, he soon overcame the so-called "abstract impressionism" of the early eighties and freed himself from the elements which, after his trip to Italy (1982), were added to his iconographic and chromatic repertoire, giving rise to a series of paintings with a markedly romantic tone. After ten years in the French capital, during which he coincided with other Spanish artists such as Barceló, Campano and Sicilia, he moved to Mallorca. With the use of large formats, the next step in his work is the recovery of an abstraction with a strong chromatic content and the advance in the spatial definition of his canvases, as shown in Capricho (1987) and La misión (1988). He has been awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1995), in 1997 he was awarded the ARCO Prize by the Critics' Association, and in 2003 the Aragón Goya Prize for Engraving. In 1995 the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him. He is currently represented in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, the FRAC (Midi-Pyrénées, France), the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection in New York, the Juan March Foundation, the Reina Sofía, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Fond National d'Art Contemporain in Paris, the Kampo Collection in Tokyo, the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the DOVE Collection in Zurich, the Ateneum in Helsinki, the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation in Amsterdam, the Maeght in France, the La Caixa Collection in Barcelona, the Preussag in Hanover and the IVAM in Valencia.