TONICO BALLESTER (ANTONIO BALLESTER)
Valencia, 1910 – Barcelona, 2001

The years that he spent at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (1922-27) put the finishing seal on his knowledge of a craft that he began to learn at a very early age by visiting the studios of various colleagues of his father, who was also a sculptor. At San Carlos he met Josep Renau, with whom –like Francisco Carreño and Paco Badía- he shared a belief in republicanism as a system of political ideas and a receptive, open attitude to new historiographic focuses, aesthetic positions and artistic languages (H. Wölfflin, W. Worringer, S. Reinach, G.V. Plekhanov, the “Futurist Manifesto”, ...). Still in the second half of the twenties, this attitude led him to move rapidly from academic naturalism to sober Art Deco aesthetics, with which, in 1929, he won the competition for the Monumento de los españoles a la independencia de Urugay (Monument of the Spaniards to the Independence of Uruguay), a work of geometrising volumes. These became more evident in various reliefs that he produced with a Cubist syntax. This characteristic and the populist appearance of a series of ceramic pieces that made in collaboration with Alfons Blat have been seen as influences of the School of Vallecas (Alberto, Díaz-Caneja, Benjamín Palencia). In 1931 he began to give classes in artistic metalwork in Valencia, and in 1933 he became a drawing teacher at the Instituto Blasco Ibáñez.
During the years of the Civil War he collaborated actively with the Antifascist Militias and the Alliance of Intellectuals for the Defence of Culture, which had emerged from the Union of Proletariat Writers and Artists founded by Renau in 1932. His work was awarded the National Sculpture Prize in 1936 and shown in the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937. Gradually it shifted towards an explicit realism, in a personal interpretation of Soviet realism. Imprisoned after the war, in 1946 he sought exile in Mexico, where he combined commissions for religious imagery with private work, including female nudes and mother and child studies. This work, influenced by Maillol and Casanovas, brought him the award of the National Sculpture Prize in Mexico in 1958. In 1960 he moved to California, where he lived until the middle of the decade. He then returned to Spain, continuing his sculptural work until 1980. His first solo exhibition, an extensive retrospective organised by the Valencia City Council, was held in 1986. He died in 2001 in Valencia at the age of 90.