Manuel Rivera

Granada, 1927 – Madrid, 1995

He began his artistic studies in Granada, concluding them at the School of Fine Arts in Seville. In 1951 he moved to Madrid and made his first abstract paintings. In 1953 he was invited by the Institute of Hispanic Culture to take part in the International Abstract Art Course held in Santander. There he meets the artists whom he would later join to create the group El Paso. In 1955 he made his first trip to Paris, where he studied avant-garde artistic movements, especially informalism. Upon his return to Spain, after a strong crisis, he definitively abandoned conventional pictorial materials and began his first experiments with metallic fabrics, where he sought a different representation of space.

In 1957 he founded El Paso and participated in the Sao Paulo and Alexandria biennials. He begins the series The Metamorphosis, inspired by Kafka. Its metallic webs are arranged in overlapping fragments, stretched by wires and with a certain appearance of a spider web. They look for two planes when creating reliefs, and the oxides provide natural colorations to the meshes. Later, the size of these become larger, and Rivera will explore the expressive possibilities of his material with optical and kinetic elements that affect the perception of the work. He seeks the light vibration, the mystery of an image displayed in depth. He highlights the Mirrors series.

In 1981 he received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, and in 1984 he was named Academician of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He died in Madrid in January 1995.