MANOLO QUEJIDO
Sevilla, (Spain) 1946

When he went to live in Madrid in 1960 he discovered the work of the generation of 1950. This influenced him in his early paintings, where there is a predominance of gesture. His first solo exhibition was held at the Galería Arteluz in 1966, with work influenced by Pop Art and Neo-Dadaism. That year he also took part in creating the Cooperativa de Producción Artística y Artesana, producing geometrical pictures and working with sequences in the arrangement of shapes on a surface. This also led to his involvement with the Computer Centre at the Complutense University. This work was presented at the Galería Buades in Madrid (1974) and the Centro M-11 in Seville (1975). In the mid-seventies he began to move away from sequential painting in series such as Mutaciones (Mutations), 1973, culminating in the development of a group of over 400 works on card called El taco (The Block), 1974-78, in which he painted all kinds of subjects with a variety of procedures and styles. From this work he extracted iconographic motifs, such as the typewriter, on which he worked transversally between 1974 and 1996. In 1978 he launched fully into painting that established a dialogue with Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Velázquez. He reflected on the language of painting and its problems in various series that spanned two decades, such as Náyades (Naiads), on Cézanne’s bathers, Tabiques (Partitions), with the motif of the black canvas, El pintor y la pintura (The Painter and the Painting), in which he made different versions of the styles of various artists, and I Love Mallorca, with echoes of Matisse. His work was exhibited at the Centro Cultural Rioja in Logroño (1988), the MEAC (1988) and the gallery of the Banco Zaragozano (1990). In 1993 he created an installation for the Palacio de Congresos y Exposiciones in Madrid, and that year he also produced various series using acrylics on a new support, the newspaper El País. This work was shown at the Galería May Moré (1994), although he continued working on it until 1996. The new decade also brought the beginning of new series such as Anstrich-Umzug (Paint-Move) and Jaque mate ¡Los relojes! (Check-mate, The Clocks!), both begun in 1993, and verazQues, started in 1996, which were shown in the artist’s most recent anthological exhibition, at the IVAM in 1997.