Manolo Valdes

Manolo Valdés (b. 1942, Valencia, Spain) is one of Spain's most celebrated living artists, working across painting, sculpture, and printmaking. He entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia at fifteen but left before completing his studies to pursue painting full time.

In 1964, Valdés co-founded the collective Equipo Crónica with Rafael Solbes and Joan Toledo, using a Pop Art vocabulary charged with irony to critique the Franco regime and the conventions of art history itself. Following Solbes's death and the group's dissolution in 1981, Valdés began a solo career defined by a more personal, art-historical dialogue — drawing on Velázquez, Matisse, Rembrandt, and Rubens, among others, and reworking their imagery in his own materially rich language of monumental paintings, bronzes, and mixed-media collage.

His large-scale bronzes, often derived from Velázquez's court portraits, and his heads and busts built from unconventional materials — jute, wood, aluminum — have become signatures of his mature style, prized for their scale and tactile surface treatment.

Valdés represented Spain at the 1999 Venice Biennale and has had major surveys at institutions including the Museo Reina Sofía and the Guggenheim Bilbao. His monumental sculpture has been sited in public spaces worldwide, including the Place Vendôme in Paris. He divides his time between New York and Madrid.