"ANZO" JOSÉ IRANZO ALMONACID (Utiel, Valencia, 1931 - 2006)."El Viti", 1964.Oil on canvas.Signed

"ANZO" JOSÉ IRANZO ALMONACID (Utiel, Valencia, 1931 - 2006).
"El Viti", 1964.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Work registered in the artist's archive.
Measurements: 122 x 94 cm.
Santiago Martin Sánchez, known as "El Viti", was one of the great figures of bullfighting in the 60s and 70s. Characterised by the sobriety and good work of the so-called "Salamanca school", he made his debut in August 1956 in the bullring of his native town. In Las Ventas he fought 54 bullfights and won 40 trophies that allowed him to walk out on his shoulders 14 times, to which must be added two more Puertas Grandes as a novillero. These feats have never again been equalled by any bullfighter in the history of the Monumental in Madrid. In 1997, the Ministry of Culture awarded him the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts. On this occasion Anzo offers us a particular dual work divided into two markedly different parts: the upper part with a portrait of the bullfighter and the lower part with the crowd of spectators in the stands.
Anzo made his first works known with the illustration of the mural diary of the Escolapios school, where he studied high school thanks to a scholarship. He attended the Escuela de Arte y Oficios in Valencia, and later moved to Barcelona to study architecture. In 1954, he returned to Valencia with the firm idea of definitively entering the plastic arts. Anzo belongs to that group of Valencian artists who emerged during the long Spanish post-war period, and who were trained in the midst of Franco's regime. Pop Art took on an increasingly predominant role in his artistic production. He began to experiment with different printmaking procedures, in a social framework clearly influenced by economic development accompanied by an inherent change in the cultural dynamics of the time. The fact of turning the world of everyday mass-media myths into a point of reference in his works opened a new artistic door in his production, in which television images would play a decisive role. Anzo thus became the introducer of pop art in Valencian artistic culture, and the maximum representative of the trend at a national level. The artist was driven by the need to combine science and art in order to assert a message about a reality that he embraced and from which his new creations drank. This new artistic dimension gradually led him away from Pop Art and towards what was known in Europe as "Mec Art". Enthusiastic about the use of the new media, Anzo began a series of paintings which he called "Aislamientos" (Isolations). In the 1980s he began what was to become his last stage. After definitively closing the latent struggle of his isolations, he began a new stage which he called "Lyrical Geometry". In the apparent coldness of the geometric lines, a poetic sensibility could be glimpsed, rediscovering colour and lyricism. His work is still linked to abstraction and offered an optimistic vision: "I believe that beauty arises from the balance between the mathematical and the lyrical". In 2003 he was awarded the Premio de las Artes Plásticas de la Generalitat Valenciana. Anzo had been retired from art for some years. The death of his wife and other personal circumstances plunged him into a process of introspection. Finally, a long illness ended his life in 2006. Anzo has had exhibitions in more than thirty countries around the world, as well as in most national capitals. His work can be found in various museums and well-known public collections, such as: Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Basel Kunstmuseum, Oslo Nasjonalgalleriet, New York Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro Museu de Arte moderna, Tel Aviv Museum, Ljubljana Moderna Galerija, etc.