20th-21st Century Spanish

Manuel Franquelo was born in Malaga and moved to Madrid at the age of nineteen when he enrolled to study telecommunication engineering. However, he dropped out in 1975 and instead took up art at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. Ever since, he has fused both disciplines in his practice.

During the eighties and nineties, he applied a slow and conscientious painterly technique to create works that eliminated all traces of the human hand. For this purpose, he even invented special devices that would allow him to better observe colour or replicate subtle strokes and glazes, in order to obtain the required degree of detail and texture he was looking for. His goal was to induce a sublime experience in the spectator when faced with such an outstanding level of meticulous precision.

Franquelo focuses on the representation of the world through insignificant and everyday objects which often go unnoticed, updating the still life genre and creating a kind of optical illusion in which specks, stains and wrinkles attest to the passing of time.

In the early-nineties he gradually moved away from painting to experiment with the human perception, construction and representation of reality through different mediums like drawing, photography and electronics.

Equally of note is his work as a researcher and teacher. He has made significant contributions to the production of facsimiles as a means of conservation, thanks to the development of a 3D scanner which was subsequently used to reproduce the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor or paintings in the National Gallery, the Prado Museum or the Louvre. In addition, in 2000 he was instrumental in founding the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Estampa Digital (Digital Print Research and Development Centre) at Calcografía Nacional, which focuses on the use of new technologies applied to graphic art.

Franquelo is represented by Galería Marlborough in Madrid and his limited production is included in major collections both here in Spain and worldwide.