A citizen of Spain, although Filipino by birth, Fernando Zobel was educated and then developed as an artist in the diverse and distant settings of the United States, the Philippines, and Spain. In 1961 he became a permanent Spanish resident, and shortly thereafter he founded the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca, which was to become an important intellectual and artistic nucleus for the avant-garde artists of the Spanish postwar era.
Accordingly, we find in Fernando Zobel a convergence of such diverse influences as American informalism, the expressionism of Spanish abstract art, and Far Eastern calligraphy. They would all contribute decisively to the fulfillment of a style and technique that Zobel started to develop in 1956, when the artist fully embraced abstraction and began eliminating whatever he deemed superfluous from his work. At the same time, he was giving artistic expression to the imprint which the reality he observed left in his uncluttered mind.
In the works offered at Blanca 7, we see how, in the late 1950s, Zobel would reduce his chromatic scale and his brush strokes to the extreme. Ultimately, we perceive only whites and blacks, and the fine lines he created, not with a paintbrush, but with glass syringes. This innovative technique allowed him to express movement—his dominant interest at the time—with maximum precision. What appears on the canvas, however, is not the movement of a particular object but the universal concept of movement. It is the expression of sensed motion, rather than its imitation. In other words, what we observe is the rendition of visually captured swiftness, by way of finely honed gestures and black lines, through which Zobel transforms his canvases into a lyric form of evanescence. Among these works is “The Birth of Pegasus,” which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1962.
Fernando Zóbel currently ranks among the major artists, not only of Spain, but also of Asia. His work appears in renowned collections and international museums, including the Ayala Museum in Manila, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (also known as The Queen Sofia Museum) in Madrid, the Museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, and the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca. A catalogue featuring an essay by Francisco Calvo Serraller was published in the occasion of this exhibit.
