BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

José Guerrero (Granada, 1914 – Barcelona, 1991). The details of José Guerrero’s life are closely linked to his oeuvre, determined from the outset by the search for new creative horizons to take him far from the suffocating atmosphere he felt in post-war Spain. After the Civil War, he enrolled at the Madrid School of Fine Arts where he resumed the artistic education he had begun in Granada until, in the 1940s, in a devastated cultural panorama, a study grant allowed him to go to Paris. It was there he was able to see for himself the works of the historic avant-garde and the Paris School. This discovery shocked Guerrero to the extent that he decided to set off in search of modernity, leading an itinerant life through several European countries, before settling in New York with Roxanne Whittier Pollock. It was here that he began to create his first purely abstract pictures, using half biomorphic, half signic shapes, and to come into contact with the most outstanding and influential gallery owners and painters in what had become the capital of contemporary art, as well as home to exiled Spanish intellectuals.