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Biography of Fernando Bellver
The Spanish painter and engraver Fernando Bellver was born in Madrid in 1954. He studied drawing, painting and modeling at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts in Madrid. At the same time, he became interested in engraving and received most of his instruction in the studio of Dimitri Papageorgiu. He made his first prints in 1976. Since then, the Madrid-based artist has made an astonishing journey through his graphic work, which was rewarded in 2008 with the Premio Nacional de Arte Gráfico, awarded by the Calcografía Nacional and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
In 1980, he began to work with the technique of lithography. That same year, thanks to a grant from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture, he worked in the Nord workshop of engraving and printing in Oslo. In 1981, the artist founded, with Arturo Garcia Armada and Fructuoso Moreno, the Atelier Majeur 28. Two years later, in 1983, Fernando Bellver was awarded a scholarship to Rome and moved to the Italian capital where he worked at the Spanish Academy. In 1985 he taught color printing at the University of Austin (Texas, USA).
In his creation, in painting as in graphic arts, Fernando Bellver moves between figuration and pop-art. In his works, the artist pays particular attention to drawing and the application of color, which he employs with skill in a vision where our society, not exempt from ccriticism, takes on great importance. His iconography feeds on recurring images from the history of art that he demystifies by transforming them into objects of consumption. The true meaning of the work is revealed to a careful eye, irony, reflection, and sometimes, behind a comic cover, the semi-hidden charge of denunciation. The artist works most often in series, concentrating particularly on his tributes to great painters and on fundamental works of the history of painting. His best-known series are "Chronicle of a Race" (1988) and "Clásica" (1992), the former a series of ten large-format prints (watercolor etchings) in which, under the guise of equestrian portraits, Fernando Bellver pays homage to the artists he admires and who have influenced him throughout his career: Braque, Picasso, Dürer, Murillo, Lichtenstein, Hopper, Rousseau, Degas, Juan Gris, Murillo and De Chirico. The second, a series of seven prints, also watercolored, ironically recreates some of the most important paintings in art history in the purest neo-pop style (Velázquez's Queen Mariana, Dürer's self-portrait, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, etc).