20th-21st Century Spanish

Although he started studying Fine Arts, he dropped out before graduating. However, Franco continued practicing painting in a self-taught manner.

The artist began to exhibit his work in the early 1970s, a period when he shared positions with the movement from Madrid together with other practitioners such as Carlos Alcolea. However, he ended up distancing himself from the group and set off on a solitary path, creating his works in a gradual, slower and more internalised fashion.

His long-standing interest in psychoanalysis, mythology and magic made them the main subject matters of his work, where he seamlessly blends precise draughtsmanship with an explosion of colour.

Franco alternates his practice as a painter with his work as a book illustrator, illustrating, among others, Virgil’s Aeneid, and as an interior designer. In 1992 he created a major mural painting for the facade of Real Casa de la Panadería in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor.

Since 2003 Franco has exhibited at Galería Marlborough, Madrid, and in 2007 the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía organised a survey of his graphic work at the Silos Monastery in Burgos.