Alfonso Albacete belongs to the generation of Spanish artists who revived the genre of painting in the 1970s and 1980s. He moved from his hometown to Murcia, where he learnt his trade with Juan Bonafé. He went on to study Architecture in Valencia and Madrid, and graduated in 1977. From 1979 onwards he worked full time on a series of paintings, starting with In the Studio, which was exhibited at the Egam Gallery in Madrid that same year, in which the influences of Paul Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism and North-American pop art could already be seen, and ending with Levante (1980), which captured the luminosity of the landscape of Murcia, and The Prague Student (1985), which depicts scenes from his travels through Central Europe. They all start from the everyday and progress though a figuration that becomes progressively more abstract. However, the figurative references never disappear entirely and the light and atmosphere are captured by a material, a bright colour range and a formal complex architecture that he continues to developed as a constant assertion of the pictorial genre.
Albacete took part in the exhibitions that set the course of Spanish art in the 1980s, such as ‘1980’ at the Juana Mordó Gallery (Madrid, 1979) and ‘Madrid D.F.’, at Madrid Municipal Museum (1980), and subsequently in later historical reviews of that time. In 1988, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. His work was also exhibited at the Moscow Modern Art Museum (2011), at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 2014), the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2014), and the Marlborough Gallery (Madrid, 2016).
Alfonso Albacete belongs to the generation of Spanish artists who revived the genre of painting in the 1970s and 1980s. He moved from his hometown to Murcia, where he learnt his trade with Juan Bonafé. He went on to study Architecture in Valencia and Madrid, and graduated in 1977. From 1979 onwards he worked full time on a series of paintings, starting with In the Studio, which was exhibited at the Egam Gallery in Madrid that same year, in which the influences of Paul Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism and North-American pop art could already be seen, and ending with Levante (1980), which captured the luminosity of the landscape of Murcia, and The Prague Student (1985), which depicts scenes from his travels through Central Europe. They all start from the everyday and progress though a figuration that becomes progressively more abstract. However, the figurative references never disappear entirely and the light and atmosphere are captured by a material, a bright colour range and a formal complex architecture that he continues to developed as a constant assertion of the pictorial genre.
Albacete took part in the exhibitions that set the course of Spanish art in the 1980s, such as ‘1980’ at the Juana Mordó Gallery (Madrid, 1979) and ‘Madrid D.F.’, at Madrid Municipal Museum (1980), and subsequently in later historical reviews of that time. In 1988, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. His work was also exhibited at the Moscow Modern Art Museum (2011), at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 2014), the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2014), and the Marlborough Gallery (Madrid, 2016).