Zamora, Mar 3 (EFE).- The El Paso group, formed between 1957 and 1960 by a dozen artists who were the great introducers of abstract art in Spain, stars in an exhibition by the Fundos Foundation that opened this Friday in Zamora as the first stop on a tour of Castilla y León.
The exhibition “El Paso. Sign of an era” includes a selection of 77 works, thirty of them sculptural and the rest paintings, by ten creators including Antonio Saura, Luis Feito, Manolo Millares, Antonio Suárez, Manuel Rivera, Rafael Canogar, Juana Francés and Manuel Viola and the sculptors Pablo Serrano and Martín Chirino.
The exhibition, promoted by Fundos with works from the foundation itself and, for the most part, from the private collection of Fernando Fernán-Gómez, can be seen in the Encarnación room in Zamora until April 26, to end at the end of summer in León and later also shown in Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo and Soria, among other places.
“Step. Sign of an era” has artistic production both before and from the years in which the artistic group was active as well as later, including some from the 21st century such as a sculpture from 2017, as a more recent work.
Grupo El Paso, pioneer of abstract art in Spain
The time tour of the sample allows us to appreciate how some of these creators were already practicing abstract art before constituting that group, while others like Antonio Saura leaned towards the figurative.
The curator of the exhibition, Luis Feás, has highlighted that the El Paso group represented the acceptance of abstract art by the Franco regime, which saw in this group of artists promoted by art galleries of the time a form of propaganda and for that reason he began to move them through the great international biennials such as the one in Venice or the one in São Paulo, which gave them international repercussions.
Among the works on display are eight that until now had not been shown to the public in an exhibition, such as some paintings by Millares and Viola or a sculpture of a crucified man and various drawings by Pablo Serrano.
El Paso created a new state of mind within the Spanish artistic world that made possible an art that coincided with the sign of the time and led to a revolutionary plastic art.
The exhibition makes it possible to distinguish between the two main abstract trends of the moment, gestural expressionism and informalism.
The owner of most of the exhibited works and son of the actor Fernando Fernán-Gómez and the singer María Dolores Pradera has explained that he has been collecting works from the El Paso group for forty years to form a “fairly complete and homogeneous” collection of that artistic group. . EFE