Manuel Chabrera

Who is Manuel Chabrera?

Manuel Chabrera. Spanish architect and artist, born in Tarragona in 1952 and raised in Andalucia; Chabrera, like Pollock, manages to make the very gesture of painting the subject matter of the piece. As Sandra Miller, British art historian, said, “The subject matter of his compositions is the result of the violence of the physical act to which Chabrera commits himself; and although watching him paint may shock his observers, the results are compositions of great beauty.”

Action painting was the name originally coined by Harold Rosemberg to describe the work of artist Willhem de Kooning, and it is, perhaps, de Kooning who is referenced when describing the work of Chabrera. But Chabrera remains firmly figurative, albeit at a Gestalt level. Although there is a correspondence between abstract expressionism or action painting and the personal expressionism of Chabrera, there are also important and substantial differences. Instead of prioritising the act of painting over the final result, Chabrera inverts the process, prioritising once again the physical object over the concept or idea.