20th Century Spanish

After training at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, together with José Vento, Ángel Medina and Julio Martín-Caro, Fraile founded Nuevo Espacialismo, literally new spatialism, a movement fusing Art Informel and figuration.

With a brief abstract interval in the middle, his practice evolved in the mid 1960s from to what has been called , defining his mid-career style which seemed to be a translation of his whimsical, grotesque drawings to large formats. The characters floating in the first paintings from that period resonate with those made by Dubuffet. His compositions with several figures then gave way to isolated portraits and to tableaux of single figures.

He earned several awards throughout his career, including the 1962 National Painting Prize, the 1963 Ateneo de Madrid Critique Award, and the 1983 National Visual Arts Prize. The Museo Reina Sofía of Madrid organised a retrospective of Fraile from October 1998 to January 1999, overviewing his life’s work.