2025Painting - Juana Frances - Miniature Sheet

Juana Francés (Alicante, 1924 – Madrid, 1990) is one of the most distinguished names in Spanish art of the second half of the 20th century, founder of the El Paso group and creator of a powerful style of painting that makes her unmistakable. Her training took place at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid) and extended with several stays in Paris and other European cities, where she came into contact with the great masters of art and the latest movements. In 1950, she entered the art scene, practicing a hieratic figuration that led her to be present at major national and international events, such as the Hispano-American Biennial and the Venice Biennale (1954). Beginning in 1956, she delved into informalist, gestural, and material abstraction, achieving critical acclaim and participating, along with others such as Pablo Serrano and Manuel Millares, in the founding exhibition of El Paso, held at the Buchholz Gallery in February 1957. Juana Francés continued her abstraction journey until 1963, when she reinterpreted her initial hieratic figuration with the series "Man and the City," to which she devoted most of her career. In 1980, she decided to return to abstraction with "Underwater Backgrounds," which would lead to her final series, Comets, in 1985.