Manolo Millares

Who was Manolo Millares?

Manolo Millares was a Spanish painter. Self-taught as an artist, Millares was introduced to Surrealism in 1948. In 1953, he moved to Madrid and became an abstract painter. In 1957, Millares along with Antonio Saura and Pablo Serrano founded the avant-garde group El Paso in Madrid. He attained an international reputation by the early 1960s, and had a solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1961.

In Madrid, Millares was associated with ‘The Informalists’, a group of artists including Antoni Tàpies, Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer and Aníbal Villacís among many others who insisted that art should be removed from theory and concept. To these artists, the gesture used to make a painting was all-important. In the 1950s, Millares began to make dramatic collages from found materials, especially burlap.