Rafael Canogar. [I] Realities [Works 1949-2024]

From 30 January to 18 May, the CentroCentro cultural space will host a revamped exhibition revolving around the extensive and productive career of the artist Rafael Canogar. It is an exhibition that brings together around sixty works, including paintings, collages and sculptural reliefs, dated between 1949 and 2024.

The exhibition portrays an artist at an extraordinary moment of his creative career, characterised by the intensity of his dedication to painting, a fire that is not detained by the abyss of the art of creation. This is combined with a distinguished position of frequenting expressive delicacy, elegance in action and praise for stillness, a reflection capable of also praising the courageous and daily confrontation with the act of painting without complexes. 

The works on display are mainly from Rafael Canogar's personal collection, along with others from private and public collections, such as the Reina Sofía National Art Centre Museum. The curator, Alfonso de la Torre, has brought together these works in five chapters that refer to a pictorial journey between the representative and the abstract, hence [I] Realities. 

The first chapter, by the name of Nature, which has moved me reflects a strange landscape from 1949, along with other recent abstract views and large-format paintings that are evocative of nature. The chronological journey continues with the following sections: Around 1957. Matter and the Sign: The Other Art; Around 1968. Secret Royalty of Pain and Abstractions and Constructions: Around 1980s. The exhibition is rounded off by returning to the 1950s, displaying a series of paintings that are evocative of Klee and Miró’s world: 1954-1955. Klee and Miró, magic.

Image Credit:

"Wind" (detail, 2023 © Rafael Canogar, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025