Obras invitadas: Millares, Rivera y Solano

The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson presents this new exhibition from 7 October to 29 November, framed within its Invited Works programme, featuring pieces by the artists Manolo Millares, Manuel Rivera and Susana Solano, held in the Masaveu collections as representatives of Informalism, an art movement that rejects geometry and pre-established forms, giving priority to the intrinsic value of materials and the freedom of pictorial gesture.

Since the 1950s, fabric gained prominence in Spain as a pictorial medium. Informalist artists introduced threads, ropes, stitching and textiles into their works to break away from the visual plane and respond to the hardship and darkness of the post-war period.

Manolo Millares began using sacking bags in 1954. Gradually, he abandoned the Canarian pictograms that had characterised his earlier work and muted his colour palette to give pre-eminence to the fabric, which was cut, stitched or crumpled into an amorphous mass, and painted with simple planes or drips of primary colours.

The use of unorthodox and hybrid materials also characterised the work of Manuel Rivera, who around 1956 abandoned canvas completely to work with metallic meshes, both commercial and handmade.

The works of Millares and Rivera were exhibited in the shows that the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated in the 1960s to assemblage as a characteristic method of the era.

For her part, Susana Solano radically departs from the anti-formal drive of these artists. Her early textile experiments from 1979-1980, at the dawn of the so-called "New Spanish Sculpture", used folds and stitching to give three-dimensional form to a soft and flexible material. The piece exhibited in this room takes advantage of the malleability of lead to turn the fold into an elementary sculptural gesture. The title, Doblec n. o 10, refers to that gesture, but also to the dual meaning of the work as esc