This group was formed by painters Jorge Ballester (b. Valencia, 1941, d. 2014) and Joan Cardells (b. Valencia, 1948), who studied together at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia. There, they made contact with a group of artists known as Crónica de la realidad ['Chronicle of Reality'], who sought to replace informalism by a realist style close to pop art, but through critical, satirical action in their images from a position of commitment to social causes. This marked the beginning of Equipo Realidad, with the work Burial of the Student Orgaz (1965-1966).
In 1967 they staged their first solo exhibition at the Vai i 30 Gallery in Valencia, but it was not until the 1970s that they honed their own form of expression based on the adoption of mass media formats, questioning visual images in a consumer society in Spain whose technification and pro-development rhetoric masked the stagnation of the Franco regime. These ideas were deployed in series such as Home, Sweet Home and Pictures of History. The latter is a reflection on the Spanish Civil War that uses photographs from a book on the war published in Buenos Aires in 1966 to recover 'unlived memories'. Cardells dropped out of the group in 1976, but Ballester continued until 1978.
They took part in major group exhibitions including Le monde en question at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art (Paris, 1967), and staged numerous solo shows in Spain, including one at the Caja de Ahorros de Navarra Cultural Centre (Pamplona, 1973) and a large-scale retrospective at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia (1993).
This group was formed by painters Jorge Ballester (b. Valencia, 1941, d. 2014) and Joan Cardells (b. Valencia, 1948), who studied together at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia. There, they made contact with a group of artists known as Crónica de la realidad ['Chronicle of Reality'], who sought to replace informalism by a realist style close to pop art, but through critical, satirical action in their images from a position of commitment to social causes. This marked the beginning of Equipo Realidad, with the work Burial of the Student Orgaz (1965-1966).
In 1967 they staged their first solo exhibition at the Vai i 30 Gallery in Valencia, but it was not until the 1970s that they honed their own form of expression based on the adoption of mass media formats, questioning visual images in a consumer society in Spain whose technification and pro-development rhetoric masked the stagnation of the Franco regime. These ideas were deployed in series such as Home, Sweet Home and Pictures of History. The latter is a reflection on the Spanish Civil War that uses photographs from a book on the war published in Buenos Aires in 1966 to recover 'unlived memories'. Cardells dropped out of the group in 1976, but Ballester continued until 1978.
They took part in major group exhibitions including Le monde en question at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art (Paris, 1967), and staged numerous solo shows in Spain, including one at the Caja de Ahorros de Navarra Cultural Centre (Pamplona, 1973) and a large-scale retrospective at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia (1993).