Martín Chirino

Martín Chirino was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1925. He studied fine arts in Madrid and spent some periods of time in Paris and London. He has been exhibiting his work in Madrid since 1958. Heir to the Spanish sculptural tradition of figures as decisive as Julio González or Pablo Gargallo, Chirino combines in his work a mastery of the blacksmith’s trade with his knowledge of international avant-garde movements and his interest in Spanish art. A token of this reflection about the role of artists in his time is his participation in the El Paso group in 1958, accompanying his good friend and fellow Canarian, Manuel Millares. In spite of the fact that he moved to Madrid, Chirino never shed his Canarian roots; his mental proximity to the nature of his homeland always inspired him. In his sculptures, reminiscences of man’s atavistic symbols and his need for harmony with the earth cohabit with the precision and roughness of traditional farm tools. Chirino developed a fundamentally geometric plastic vocabulary, imbued with lyricism nonetheless, where the use of the spiral comes to the fore; this form is recurrent in his work, and the artist himself has called it a “mythical referent”, as the symbol that makes us reflect about the memory of bygone civilisations, the traces of man and his presence on Earth. The exhibition prepared by the IVAM is curated by Tomàs Llorens and Boye Llorens; it is a retrospective exhibition that reflects all the aspects of the Canarian author’s sculptural production in over twenty-five pieces. Besides, a profusely illustrated catalogue containing essays by the two curators and reproductions of all the works shown will be brought out.