Juan Giralt (Madrid, 1940-2007) enjoyed early success that made him stand out very young among the painters of his generation. Along with his mastery of colour and plasticity, he is normally noted for the solidity and independence of his pictorial output, i.e. the fact that, without being outside the currents of his time, he came up with a wholly recognisable discourse of his own. This despite having followed a path with perpetual shifts, eschewing labels, easy solutions, formulas.
Early on he was torn between abstraction and figuration, between the cool analysis of forms and space and the expressiveness of gesture, albeit even then showing a visible urge to integration as was to crystallise in his splendid maturity.
With a self-taught background, he held his first exhibition at Galería Fernando Fé in Madrid in 1959, under the influence of informalism. After studying painting in London as a guest student, he lived successively in Paris and Amsterdam, where he made contact with the CoBrA Group and exhibited at Galerie Mokum in 1963.
Later attracted by the figurative work of Bacon, he participated in the generational break with informalism as of the early 60s, when he discovered pop art and began working on serial human outlines.
In the 70s his work became more acerbic, and without wholly giving up drawing, he disrupted his lines or subverted them with convoluted geometries and automatic figures painted on the canvas or cut out in paper as collages. As his presence grew at biennial events and international fairs, he took part as an advisor in the creation of the legendary Galería Vandrés, where he exhibited on his own in 1972, 1974 and 1976, and became, with Luis Gordillo, an icon of the ‘New Madrid Figuration’.
Juan Giralt’s artistic career embraces broadly three stages. In the first he evolves from post-CoBrA expressionism to neo-figuration with pop resonances. In the second, in the 80s, after setting casting off old complicities and living in New York, he is more inward-looking, exploring new paths alternating abstraction with pseudo-figurative hybridisation using collage. In the third, his most abstract period, he combines his old geometrising urge with a centrifugal tension destabilising the balances achieved with impulsive brushstrokes inherited from expressionism, and an often ironical meta-pictorial interplay between the painting itself and exogenous additions: advertising designs, booklets, maps, photo portraits, made-up words, etc.
From the early 90s, when his work began to form part of major public and private collections, Giralt’s reputation consolidated him as one of the most singular and suggestive figures of contemporary Spanish art. The footprint of his uninhibited eclecticism and his peculiar treatment of pictorial space is traceable in many subsequent artists.