Antonio Saura

His first contact with the international art world came during a stay in Paris in 1952, where he encountered the Surrealists through Benjamin Péret and formed a friendship with the painter Simon Hantaï. Though he absorbed Surrealist automatism, he did not remain within the movement. By the mid-1950s he had found his own register: large canvases worked in black, grey and brown, attacking the surface with a loaded brush, tearing at the figure without ever quite dissolving it. Women, crucifixions, self-portraits, shrouds - the subjects returned obsessively, transformed each time by the violence of the mark.

In 1957 he co-founded El Paso in Madrid alongside Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito, Manolo Millares and others, a group that sought to inject Spanish art with the energy of European informalism while implicitly rejecting the cultural stagnation of Francoist Spain. The group lasted only until 1960, but its impact was lasting. That same year Saura appeared at the Venice Biennale, followed by Documenta in Kassel in 1959, and the Guggenheim International Award in 1960. In 1961 he began showing at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. He settled permanently in Paris in 1967, maintaining his opposition to the Franco regime until its end.

Saura's dialogue with Spanish painting history was persistent and direct. He made explicit series responding to Velázquez's portraits and to Goya, not as homage but as argument. From 1959 he also became a committed printmaker, producing lithographs and etchings to illustrate Cervantes's Don Quijote, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kafka's diaries and Quevedo's Three Visions, among many others. Works entered the permanent collections of MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. He received the Carnegie Prize in 1964 alongside Eduardo Chillida and Pierre Soulages, and the Grand Prix des Arts of the City of Paris in 1995. He died in Cuenca on 22 July 1998.

On Auctionist, Saura appears primarily as a printmaker. Of 19 catalogued items, 13 fall under Prints and Engravings, with only one painting. His work has circulated mainly through Bukowskis Stockholm (10 items) and Barcelona Auctions (3 items), confirming his presence in both the Swedish and Iberian secondary markets. Titles such as works from the "Portraits" series, the Diversaurio portfolio and Don Quijote lithographs are represented. Prices in the dataset are modest - the top result is DKK 7,500 for a signed colour lithograph - reflecting that his prints, while numerous and accessible, sit at a different price point from his paintings, which at major international sales reach into the hundreds of thousands.