CLAUDIO BRAVO (Valparaíso, Chile, 1936- Morocco, 2011).
"Carlos Serrano", 1963.
Pencil and sanguine on paper.
Signed in the lower right corner. Signed, dated and titled on the back.
Provenance: private collection conceived since the 1970s between London and Madrid.
Measurements: 37.5 x 28.5 cm; 49 x 40 cm (frame).
Bravo, a hyperrealist painter, Claudio Bravo studied art in the studio of Miguel Venegas Cifuentes in Santiago de Chile. In 1954 he held his first exhibition, at the Salón 13 in the same city, when he was only seventeen years old.
In the sixties he settled in Madrid as a portraitist, and became very famous for the verisimilitude he achieved in his works. His concern for the qualities and details of objects is reminiscent of Velázquez and his baroque naturalism. In fact, during this period he spent in Madrid he devoted himself to an in-depth study of the works in the Prado, especially the Italian Renaissance and the Spanish Baroque. In 1963 he held his first exhibition in Madrid, and in 1968 he spent some years working in the Philippines for the family of President Ferdinand Marcos. In 1970 he had his first exhibition at the Staemplfi Gallery in New York, and two years later he moved to Tangiers, where he lives and works to this day. In 1994 he organised a solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile.
Bravo painted portraits of some of the most important figures of the time, such as Francisco Franco, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and Malcolm Forbes. He is represented in the Baltimore and Philadelphia Museums of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile, the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico, the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and the Palmer Museum in Pennsylvania.