(Las Palmas 1926–1972 Madrid)
Composicion con dimension perdida, 1956, signed and dated Millares 56, countersigned, dated and inscribed on the stretcher, mixed media on canvas, 65 x 92.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Gustau Camps Collection, Barcelona
Private Collection, Barcelona
Cornette de Cyr, 20 October 2012, lot 35
Private Collection, Switzerland

Exhibited:
Madrid, Ateneo, C. L. Popovici, Las arpilleras de Millares, 2 - 25 February 1957, exh. cat. no. IX , ill, pp. 28 – 29
La Corogne (Spain), Fondation Caixa Galicia, Alfonso de la Torre, Manolo Millares, la destruction et l’amour, 14 July - 20 October 2006, p. 66, ill.
New York, Di Donna Galleries, Nuvolo and Post-war materiality 1950 – 1965, curated by Germano Celant, 27 October 2017 – 28 January 2018
Brussels, Galerie de la Béraudière, 2020, Dubuffet et les artistes de la matière.

Literature:
Alfonso de la Torre, Catalogue raisonné des peintures de Manolo Millares, Museo Reina Sofia, Fondation Azcona, Madrid, 2004, no. 72, p. 100, ill. (with other dimensions : 70 x 90 cm).
José-Augusto França, Millares, Éditions Polígrafa et Cercle d’Art, Barcelone-Paris, 1977-1991, n°56, page 41, ill.(with other dimensions : 70 x 90 cm).
Vicente Aguilera Cerni, Millares, El Paso, Monographie n°1, Gráficas Luis Pérez, Madrid, 1957, n°8, page 18, ill.

Manolo Millares is one of the most important Spanish painters of Post War. He created an independent abstract-informal pictorial language after having initially experimented with Surrealism. From the mid-1950s onwards, he integrated the raw surface and aesthetic quality of traditional burlap fabrics into his pictorial works, later developing his corporeal painting further into dramatic assemblages of gathered textiles reminiscent of human forms.

His 1956 cycle Composicion con dimension perdida is inspired by the organic forms of cave painting in the Canary Islands - Millares’s homeland - as well as by écriture automatique. The present work consists of an accumulation of isolated sign-like elements on a lime-white plastered surface, behind which the rough hessian emerges. The expressive power of the painting lies in the tension between positive, corporeal settings and negative, recessed surfaces, painted and hewn holes, construction and destruction.
Millares, whose family was persecuted by the Franco regime, has repeatedly related the violence of the holes typical of his oeuvre to the wars of the 20th century, but the "infinite dimension" of these holes also conceals the possibility of alleviating existential fear and trauma.

The exhibition of this cycle at the Sala of the Prado del Ateneo in Madrid laid the foundation for Millares’s international career; in 1957 he showed his works at the 4th Biennial in Sao Paulo, and in 1960 in two group exhibitions in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum.

„Perforated and inhabited by emptiness, the fabrics of Millares are shown to us as subjects that are marked by their own faults. For the artist, for his technique, the difficulty in considering space is tied in with its relation to emptiness, to the opening.

The medium and the surface suddenly take on an evident necessity. The canvas ceasing to be the background upon which tradition is painted, becoming instead the material, torn and holed, that takes the form of a body.“
Emmanuel Guigon, „The Body of Painting II“, in: Manolo Millares. Building Bridges, Not Walls, Barcelona: Mayoral, 2017, p. 37f.