Miguel Berrocal

Miguel Ortíz Berrocal was born in Villanueva de Algaidas, Málaga, in 1933. He began his academic training in the Faculty of Exact Sciences in Madrid, where he read the first two years of mathematics as a requirement for enrolment in the School of Architecture. Meanwhile, like many others who aspired to study architecture, he attended the School of Arts and Crafts, where he was taught by Ángel Ferrant, and later he studied with the potter Pierre Canivet in Paris. He took an early interest in sculpture that could be taken apart, transformed or combined, and this has remained a feature of all his subsequent sculptural output. In his sculpture there is a constant search for new concepts and unknown areas within the very structure of the work, creating a path by which the viewer can enter the world of construction and deconstruction. His work has been influenced by sculptors such as Oteiza and Chillida, among others. He uses classical themes (torsos, heads or reclining figures) and, above all, a certain anthropomorphism to avoid an excessively geometrical, abstract result, although in his work there is a clear imprint of mathematics and architecture, resulting from his own inclination or his academic training. His style is characterised by a Hellenic inspiration, a baroque quality, and a complexity and breadth of forms. The meticulousness and precision in the construction of complex manipulable pieces and the exactness of the drawings and subsequent assemblages result in sculptural elements that in turn consist of other pieces with an identity of their own. It was precisely the difficulty involved in the creation of each individual sculpture that in 1962 led him to embark on serial production. This provided the sculptor with a way of multiplying his pieces, just as painters do by means of graphic arts procedures. Thus a given theme may be repeated in a different dimension, with the combination of new elements or arranged in a different way. In 1974 his style underwent a remarkable reduction, and he began to make simpler, mechanistic forms. In his most recent period he has used increasingly elemental, essential drawing. His first solo show was at the Xagra gallery in Madrid in 1952. Since then he has presented numerous exhibitions throughout the world, and his work is to be found in leading museums and institutions in Europe and America. The exhibition at the IVAM provides a thematic and chronological survey of Berrocal’s entire sculptural output, concentrating on the most representative pieces. It is divided into different sections—early sculptures, torsos, women—and it shows key works such as the great wooden torso Richelieu, which will be shown in a fully disassembled state as the central focus of the exhibition. It will also include a selection of drawings directly connected with the sculptures exhibited. A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition, containing colour reproductions of all the works and a theoretical essay by the art historian Lola Jiménez Blanco, together with literary contributions by writers and poets such as José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, Ángela Vallvey and Valentí Puig.