FRANCISCO SOBRINO

1932 - 2014

1932 (Guadalajara, Spain) – 2014 (Bernay, France)
Worked and lived in France and Spain

 

Francisco Sobrino was a Spanish artist and pioneer of both Op and Kinetic Art. His complex sculptures explore the limits of visual perception, challenging traditional notions of dynamics of form in art through movement and optical illusions. Many of Sobrino’s three-dimensional constructions move, and can be manipulated by the viewer. He also explored the effects of light, focusing on reflections, absorption qualities, transparency, and optical illusions created by shadows. “Using geometrical forms enabled me to understand what I was doing, it helped me to tell things in a clear language,” he once said. “I wanted to create a kind of alphabet of elementary and impersonal forms, with which I could build sentences. I still have the same desire: to be clear.”

Born in 1932 in Guadalajara, Spain, he went on to study at the Escuela de Arte y Oficios in Madrid and the National School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires before moving to Paris, where he began his career as an artist and spent much of his life. Sobrino was the subject of many solo exhibitions throughout his life, and his work is part of major museum collections such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Fondazione Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He died on May 11, 2014 in Paris, France at the age of 82.

Biography (PDF)
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