Miguel Ángel Campano is one of the key figures in the renewal of Spanish painting in the final decades of the twentieth century. His work, which he himself often described as a “non-style,” is built upon a continuous exploration of the tensions between abstraction and figuration, tradition and modernity, emotional impulse and rational analysis. Far from aligning himself with any defined movement or aesthetic, Campano articulated his practice through successive cycles, each displacing the previous one without cancelling it out, generating a trajectory that was recognized by the National Prize for Fine Arts in 1996 for “his decisive contribution to the debate on the new Spanish painting” and for the “rigor and courage with which he has developed a body of work in which construction and expressiveness are exemplary allied.”
Central to his work is the free and transgressive reinterpretation of the great masters of the Western pictorial tradition—Poussin, Cézanne, Delacroix, Géricault, Buren—not as an exercise in quotation or homage, but as a method of appropriation and escape. By observing and painting the painting of the past, Campano saw himself as the heir to the languages that art history makes available to the artist, yet in order to unleash from them something radically his own. His best-known series—Las vocales, Ruth y Booz, La Grappa, Los naufragios, Elías (d’après Daniel Buren)—bear witness to this capacity to assimilate and transform, to appropriate a canon in order to break free from it.
Throughout his career, Campano’s language passed through very different phases: from the Cuenca-rooted geometric abstraction of the 1970s to the large-scale gestural expressionism of the 1980s, through the processes of chromatic and formal purification of the 1990s and the renewed prominence of color and pattern in his final works. In all of them, the same intention persists: to make painting a site of experimentation and knowledge, of rigor and risk at once.
Miguel Ángel Campano studied Fine Arts at the San Carlos School of Valencia and Architecture in Madrid. He began exhibiting in 1969 and in 1971 came into contact with Fernando Zóbel and the circle of artists in Cuenca, an experience that proved decisive for the development of his early geometric abstraction. In 1976 he moved to Paris, where his work shifted toward a gestural expressionism with North American roots. In the 1980s he took part in the group exhibitions that defined the renewal of Spanish painting—alongside Miquel Barceló, José María Sicilia, Ferran García Sevilla, and José Manuel Broto—among them 1980 at Galería Juana Mordó (Madrid, 1979) and Madrid DF at the Museo Municipal de Madrid (1980). His most significant solo exhibitions include the major retrospective at IVAM Centre del Carme (Valencia, 1990–1991), the exhibition at the Palacio de Velázquez of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1999), and the retrospective D’après at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2019–2020), the last exhibition in which the artist was able to participate directly. In 1996 he was awarded the National Prize for Fine Arts for his decisive contribution to the debate on the new Spanish painting. His work is held in collections such as those of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the British Museum (London), IVAM, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, ARTIUM, the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español de Cuenca, the Banco de España Collection, and the Hastings Foundation (New York), among others.