Jordi Teixidor is a key artist in the Spanish abstract pictorial art of the 1970s. After training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia (1959-1964), in 1966 he was appointed as joint curator of the newly-opened Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca together with José María Yturralde. There, he met Fernando Zóbel and other artists in the Cuenca Group such as Gustavo Torner and Gerardo Rueda, who were major influences on him. In 1967 he joined the group of artists referred to by critic and painter Juan Antonio Aguirre as the 'New Generation', and took part in group exhibitions. After a period in which he was influenced by late-60s pop art, he made contact with the French Supports-surfaces movement in Paris in 1972. This led him to rethink his own painting, bringing pictorial problems into the foreground. He then developed a geometrical abstract style clearly influenced by Constructivism and close to US Minimalism, particularly the work of Barnett Newman, whom he met in New York in 1973.

In 1980 he secured a Studio Program grant from the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in New York. This led him to begin a new phase of his career as a painter, with works on the frontier between geometric and action painting, with an expressive use of colour and transparency. After living in New York from 1979 to 1982 he moved to Madrid. In the 1990s his painting shifted towards the monochrome, with titles that alluded to the idea of limits. Midway through the decade the colour black became a prominent feature of his paintings. After the turn of the century he began to show a tendency to seek out volume effects with modular, three-dimensional structures supplementing coloured surfaces combined with woven surfaces in which gestures can be seen.

His first solo exhibition was at the Mateu Gallery in Valencia in 1966. Since then his work has been on show continually at Spanish and US galleries, with stand-out exhibitions at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 1997), the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, USA, 1997), the Santa Monica Art Centre (Barcelona, 2001), the Casa del Cordón Cultural Centre (Burgos, 2002), the Amós Salvador Gallery (Logroño, 2002) and an itinerant exhibition organised in 2004 by the State Corporation for Cultural Action Abroad in Sofia (National Gallery for Foreign Art), Rome (Spanish Academy) and Thessaloniki (Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation). He has also taken part in historic group exhibitions such as 'España. Vanguardia artística y realidad social 1936-1976' ['Spain: Artistic Avant Garde and Social Reality'] at the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1976) and 'New Images from Spain' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1980). He won the National Award for Plastic Arts in 2014 and joined the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid in 2000.

Roberto Díaz