Juan Henoves' property in the Opera Gallery.

The Gallery Opera, with 16 branches around the world, presents the legacy of Juan Genovés - a renowned Spanish artist who captured the chaos of fascism. In honor of his joining, the gallery's branch in Madrid will showcase his works in a group exhibition this May. Genovés was previously represented by the Marlborough Gallery (New York and London). He passed away in May 2020, leaving behind a collection of socially realistic works that compellingly examined the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent regime of Francisco Franco. Born in Valencia in 1930, he grew from a boy into a young man amidst this political turmoil and during the period after Franco, known as the Transition, helping to shape the cultural landscape in Spain.

The Gala Opera presents the legacy of Juan Genovés.

“The Gallery Opera is pleased to present the legacy of this prolific artist, whose contributions remain significant in the context of art history in Spain and beyond,” said the chairman and CEO of the gallery, Gilles Dyan, in an interview with ARTnews.

The art of Juan Genovés was highly political and rejected the elitism of abstract art. He believed that the struggle of the working class was too urgent to depend on interpretation. After viewing an American pop art exhibition in Madrid in 1962, Genovés said, "I began to understand that painting could be used for true expression, that it could be more than just splashes of abstraction." One of his most famous works, the oil canvas "The Screams" (1967), depicts a crowd, which he described as his "artistic obsession," fleeing from an anonymous horror. About 500,000 reproductions of another work, depicting running figures, the acrylic and silkscreen print "El Abrazo" (1973-1976), were distributed throughout Spain during the social changes following Franco's death in 1975.

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In the later years of his life, he shifted from the madness of his early paintings to reflections on the individual's place in the social environment. Genovés often portrayed his characters from an aerial perspective, as if embodying the viewpoint of a god or a bird. "I realized that my crowds emerge as individual personalities," Genovés said. "I am interested in depicting each person with all their minute differences." His works were enthusiastically received during his lifetime and are now in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Valencia Institute of Modern Art in Spain. In 1966, he received a special award at the Venice Biennale in Italy. "Juan Genovés faced the empty canvas head-on, with astonishing mastery of perspective; the horizon always marked the surface of his painting, but it was far away, and his bird's-eye view, which did not lose detail, ultimately represented the gaze of a photojournalist in the eye of a hurricane," said Belén Herrera Ottino, director of the Spanish branch of Opera, in an interview with ARTnews. Ottino added, "I am sure that Juan will continue to paint life from above, always from a bird's-eye view."