ANTONIO SAURA (Huesca, 1930 - Cuenca, 1998). "Lady", 1956. Ink on paper. Presents label of the Van de Loo Gallery, Munich. Framed in museum glass. Signed and dated in the upper right corner. Measurements: 75 x 52,5 cm; 95 x 73 cm (frame). In the back of this work an informative label of the Gallery Van de Loo in Munich can be appreciated. Saura's contact with this relevant artistic space came from his friendship with Rodolphe Stadler of Paris, who introduced the artist to Pierre Matisse in New York and to Otto Van de Loo of Munich, thus promoting the internationalization of Saura's work. In this painting the Spanish pictorial tradition is rescued through the realization of a portrait. For this he uses a dark chromatic range, a character portrayed facing the viewer, and a neutral background that allows monumentalizing and highlighting the figure of the protagonist; characteristics that were established in Spanish art through painters such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya or Solana. But even so, Saura does not try to recreate established patterns, but to go beyond and give life to a portrait that flees from the figurative and makes contact with other artistic currents such as abstraction, through a completely personal aesthetic. A pictorial look that starts from tradition and joins Saura's mastery to that of the great masters. Thus managing not only to create an expressive, dynamic and exacerbated portrait through his technique, but also to contextualize himself in contemporaneity, as one of the great Spanish artists. A portrait very similar to the present one, entitled "Lola" and made in the same year, 1956, is in the artistic collection of the Museo Nacional y Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Self-taught, Antonio Saura began to paint and write in Madrid in 1947. Three years later he held his first solo exhibition at the Libros bookstore in Zaragoza, showing a series of experimental works ("Constelaciones" and "Rayogramas"), created during the long illness that kept him immobilized since 1943, for a period of five years. In 1952 he made his first exhibition in Madrid, at the Buchholz bookstore, where he exhibited his youthful, dreamlike and surrealist works, and that same year he visited Paris for the first time, settling in the city. There his work was influenced by artists such as Miró and Man Ray, and he dedicated himself to making paintings on canvas and paper of an organic nature, using various techniques. The break with the surrealist group allows him to open up to other ways of creation, where he begins to show the evolution that his work is undergoing, which moves towards an instantaneous painting of gestural strokes and reduced palette of selective character, where informalism plays the misleading between suggestive expressions of line and color. He made his debut in Paris in 1957, at the Stadler Gallery, the same year he founded the El Paso group. The following year he took part in the Venice Biennale in the company of Chillida and Tàpies, and in 1960 he received the Guggenheim Prize in New York, and in 1963 his first retrospectives were held at the Stedelijk Museum in Eindhoven, the Rotterdamsche Kunstring and the museums of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro (works on paper). Saura's retrospective exhibitions are repeated throughout his career, both in Spain and in Europe and America. In 1966 he exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and participated in the Biennial of Engraving "Bianco e Nero" in Lugano, winning the Grand Prize. The following year he settled in Paris, although he worked and spent every summer in Cuenca, a fundamental pillar of his production since his early years. He is represented in the most important national and international contemporary art museums, including the Neue Nationalgalierie in Berlin, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London. Framed in museum glass.