"The works of Juan Genovés, a visual poet of the social movement in Spain, are now showcased at Opera Gallery."

The Opera Gallery presents the legacy of Juan Genovés, a famous Spanish artist who captured the chaos of fascism. The gallery has 16 branches around the world. In honor of his joining, the Madrid branch of the gallery will showcase his works at a group exhibition in May.

Earlier, Henoves collaborated with the Marlborough Gallery (New York and London). Henoves passed away in May2020, leaving behind a legacy of socialist realist works that keenly explored the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Franco regime. Born in Valencia in1930, he grew from a child to a young man during this political upheaval and in the post-Franco period, known as the Transition, helped in the restoration of the Spanish cultural landscape.

"Opera Gallery is pleased to present the legacy of this prolific artist, whose legacy holds an important place in the context of art history in Spain and beyond," said Gilles Dyan, chairman and general manager of the gallery, ARTnews.

Henowes' art was fiercely political and rejected the elitism of abstract art. The struggles of the working class, he seemed to say, were too urgent to be captive to interpretation.

One of his best-known works, the oil painting Screams (1967) depicts a crowd, an image Henoves returned to frequently, calling it "an artistic obsession - an escape from anonymous terror." Some 500,000 reproductions of another work with running figures, acrylic and silkscreen, Embrace (1973-1976), were distributed throughout Spain, which was in social flux after Franco's death in 1975.

Later in his life, the furor of his early works gave way to meditations on the place of the individual in the social structure. Often Henowes depicted his subjects from a bird's eye view, as if conveying the perspective of a god or a bird. "I realized that my crowds became individuals," Henowes said. "I am interested in portraying each person with all their minute differences."

His work was enthusiastically received during his lifetime and is now in the collections of museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Valencia Institute of Contemporary Art in Spain. In 1966, he received a special award at the Venice Biennale in Italy.

"Juan Henoves confronted the blank canvas face to face with his astounding mastery of perspective; the horizon always remained on the surface of his painting, but it was far away and his bird's eye gaze, never missing a detail, was ultimately a photojournalist's gaze in the eye of the hurricane," said Belén Herrera Ottino, director of the Spanish branch of Opera Belén, ARTnews.

Ottino added: "I'm sure now Juan will continue to portray life from the top, always from a bird's eye view."