In 1948, Canogar went to study under the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz at his studio in Madrid. In the evenings he studied drawing at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. His first works were landscapes, portraits and still lifes, and he began to experiment with avant-garde idioms such as cubism. In 1954, he turned to abstract painting, with certain Miró-like features and in 1957 he engaged fully with the informalist style. He was a founding member of the El Paso group, with works in which he applied the paint directly to the canvas, spreading it with his hands or a palette knife in brisk strokes, to create compositions of great expressive and gestural force, in subdued shades of white, grey and brown, using black as the main colour in the formation of the image. In 1964 he returned to figuration, incorporating images from the media, in fragmentary form on an undefined background of pictorial matter, as an expression of a chaotic reality, and expanding the tonal range. From 1967 on, his painting became more critically realist, with pictures peopled by faceless figures — an allusion to the collective struggle. These figures are frequently made to protrude from the canvas using polyester and fiberglass modelling, or by adding objects such as clothes, to confer a sculptural dimension on the works. With the restoration of political freedom in Spain, Canogar returned to abstract art in 1975. He explored the intrinsic elements of the paint itself through a geometric arrangement of forms, endowing the colour with an expressive quality of its own. Since then, he has continued to paint in the same style, except in the 1980s and 1990s, when he made a series of heads as an homage to the plastic language of Julio Gonzalez.

His work has been shown extensively on the international circuits in exhibitions on the El Paso group and at events such as the Venice Biennale (1956, 1958, 1962 and 1968) and the São Paulo Biennial (1959 and 1971). He recently had an exhibition at the Mexico Museum of Modern Art (Mexico City, 2015); the Tate Gallery (London, 2015); and the Fundación Juan March (Madrid, 2016). In 1972, he was the subject of a first anthological exhibition at the Spanish Museum of Modern Art (Madrid) and, subsequently, a retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, 2001) and another at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 2013). Among other accolades, he received the National Plastic Arts Award in 1982 and the Spanish Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2003. He has been a member of the Royal San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid since 1996.

Roberto Díaz