20^th Century Spanish

Thanks to his personal reformulation of the visual medium, Manuel Sáez is one of the most notable painters from the generation of painters who started out in the 1980s. His work places the beholder somewhere between the conceptual and the sentient.

After studying at the School of Arts and Crafts of Castellón, he later enrolled at the School of Graphic Arts of Barcelona. In 1989 Sáez obtained a Banesto art scholarship and settled in Madrid.

In that period his vocabulary moved closer to the world of comics, while also assimilating the art of the early avant-gardes as well as neo-expressionist and .

In 1990 he went to study at the Spanish Academy in Rome with a scholarship. The experience proved to be a turning point in his career: he discontinued the painting he had been creating up to that point and totally embraced opposing aesthetic values. He began to paint a series of self-portraits in a stylised figuration, with markedly delimitated profiles and rendered with a thoroughness and neatness clearly grounded in the metaphysical movement.

Using a schematic, flat technique, his painting depicted images such as trees, airplanes or figures as emblems or visual metaphors. In his most recent works, architectural motifs also play a more significant role.

In 2003 he created a 1,848 square metre mosaic for the Agora at Universidad Jaime I in Castellón with the image of a white glove as a symbol of education.

Manuel Sáez has exhibited his works in many museums and institutions. In 1996 he had his first survey show, a touring exhibition titled Colección Exclusiva 1984-1995, which was followed by another two retrospectives, both held in 2000: one at Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, and the other at the IVAM, Valencia.