SALVADOR VICTORIA
Rubielos de Mora (Spain), 1929 – Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 1994 
His family moved to Valencia in 1937, and there he began to draw, encouraged by the environment around him, starting at the Escuela de San Carlos in 1947. In 1953 he presented his first solo exhibition at the Círculo Artístico in Granada and he visited Ibiza, where he met painters from the north. After this he moved to Madrid, and in 1956 to Paris. There he broke away from his earlier figuration and moved towards matter-focused Informalism and Tachism. His first solo exhibition in Paris was held at the Galerie La Roue (1956), followed by La Beaune (Paris, 1958), the Biennale di Venezia (1960) and Kopcke (Copenhagen, 1961). In 1963 he was one of the founders of the Tempo group, together with Gentry, Kaner, Sornum and Nicolaus, and he exhibited with them in various parts of Europe. The following year he returned to Spain, where he became one of the artists at the Galería Juana Mordó. During that period he participated with Caruncho, Caballero and Álvaro Delgado in founding the Ruedo Ibérico group. In 1965 he began to organise space in his works. He introduced new supports, such as wood, made collages, and modified his colour range, exhibiting his work at the Ateneo. During the seventies, the compositional elements began to form geometrical arrangements, with a predominance of curving and rounded shapes, directed towards a distant allusion to landscape, with a return to oils and canvas. In 1975, in his exhibition at Juana Mordó, his work was defined by cosmogonic formations, with a predominance of the figures of the circle and the sphere, presented with a chromatic range of warm colours. In 1979 he began teaching at the Complutense University, while the eighties and nineties brought retrospectives such as those at the Centro Cultural de la Villa de Madrid (1984), the Palacio de la Lonja in Saragossa (1985), the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid (1995), and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santander (1996). In his paintings of the nineties there was a shift away from a rigid geometrical approach through greater use of the diagonal and cultivation of nuances of colour, while he also produced an extensive range of graphic work.