Miguel Berrocal
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Biography
| 1933-2006
MIGUEL BERROCAL: BIOGRAFIA 1933 Miguel Ortiz Berrocal was born on 28 September at Villanueva de Algaidas, in the province of Malaga, in Spain. 1943-51 At a very early age he shows a vocation for art and research. He makes his own toys with recycled material, draws, and paints with colours that he prepares himself. He completes his education in Madrid. A fundamental experience is his first visit to the Prado, to which he returns regularly. He attends the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and the Escuela de Artes Graficas, and goes to evening classes at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, where the sculptor Ángel Ferrant becomes his teacher and his friend. 1952-53 He enrols at the Faculty of Exact Sciences to prepare for the entrance examination for Architecture. He becomes particularly interested in analytical geometry, a decisive choice that subsequently stimulates his artistic creation. His first exhibition takes place in Madrid at the Galería Xagra, where he shows drawings of people and landscapes of Algaidas and Madrid, signing with his paternal surname, Ortiz. He is awarded a grant to study in Italy. After visiting the scenes of Roman civilisation, with which he is familiar only through his classical studies, he lives in Rome for several months. There, for the first time, he discovers the work of Picasso—prohibited in Spain at the time—in a major exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. 1954 He goes back to Spain to do his military service. He returns to the Faculty of Exact Sciences and resumes his drawing and sculpture classes. He finds his friend Ferrant, who encourages him and stimulates him to work. He is invited to take part in the XXVII Biennale di Venezia, where he exhibits his drawings in the Spanish Pavilion, still signing as Ortiz. 1955-56 Personal exhibitions in Seville and Jerez de la Frontera. He takes part in various group exhibitions: at the Palais de l’UNESCO in Paris, the Bienal Hispanoamericana in Barcelona, Arte Joven in San Sebastián, and others. The award of a grant by the Institut Français in Madrid enables him to travel to Paris, where he continues his activity as a painter, plunging into the stimulating atmosphere that the city offers him. He frequently sees the sculptors Cárdenas and Giacometti and many others. He returns to Rome, where he meets Afro, Burri, Guerrini and other artists living in Rome. He works for various established architects, and with a group of young companions he prepares an entry for the project for the construction of the Chamber of Commerce in Carrara. For the ornamentation of the facade the twenty-two-year-old Berrocal invents a solution of Balaustradas, a work based on eight modules, with which he obtains a number of permutations and combinations that far exceed his requirement, which is to make each of the balustrades of the building different from all the others.