In connection with the exhibition Masaveu Collection. Twentieth-Century Spanish Art: From Picasso to Barceló, Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson is pleased to present the latest instalment of Guest Works, a programme that periodically exhibits pieces by artists represented in the Masaveu collections in order to raise the profile of these holdings and shed new light on some of their most outstanding authors.

This time the spotlight is on Fernando Mignoni (Madrid, 1929–2011), an artist active during the second half of the twentieth and early years of the twenty-first century whose work reflects many of the interests of a generation committed to formal experimentation. The exhibition presents a work from his series titled Arquitectura espacial [Spatial Architecture], the culmination of years spent exploring the possibilities of painting and its relationship with space.

Trained in Madrid but always with one eye on the latest movements in Spanish and international art, Mignoni developed a body of work defined by constant searching and the gradual refinement of his artistic proposals. From his early dalliances with Art Informel as part of the Hondo group to his final pieces in which compositional structure played a central role, his oeuvre evolved towards an increasingly intense reflection on the spatial aspects of painting.

Many of those ideas and interests are summed up in the featured piece, in which an exploration of the limits of the visual work of art converges with an interest in pivotal artists like Lucio Fontana and Jesús Rafael Soto and an investigation that pushed painting past the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. In the Arquitectura espacial series, the work expands into the surrounding space, physically breaking away from the support while maintaining the geometric rigour of minimalism.