MADRID.- The exhibition Gerardo Rueda: Monumental Sculpture in the IVAM Collection is fruit of the agreement between IVAM and the Fundacion Gerardo Rueda and can be viewed at Paseo del Prado and Cuesta de Moyano through February 26. Gerardo Rueda devoted part of his work to public sculpture, so this sample of pieces from the IVAM collection aims to bring the public and all those who visit the exhibition this facet of his creative career in this area of Madrid. The exhibition displays a set of six large-format works that reflect the sculptural technique of Rueda, who reconciles his constructive side with his passion for the coloring, the geometric prospects, the still life and the use of materials like wood and chrome.

Gerardo Rueda (Madrid 1926-1996) belongs to a generation of artists more engaged with their time and art, as Fernando Zóbel or Gustavo Torner, with whom he founded the Museum of Abstract Spanish Art of Cuenca. Self-taught, he abandoned his law studies so as to dedicate himself to painting. His first works, marked by a cubist influence, already contained the seeds of what would be his whole subsequent production: order and structure. In fact, the objective that accompanied the whole of his artistic career was to reduce content to its purest essence, dispensing with anecdotes or unnecessary detail, the fruit of an interior need for a space of silence and meditation, but without opting for geometric abstraction.

Although the history has placed Rueda in the realm of informalism, with his glance at the classic being understood as not being an interest in antiquity but rather a formal attitude in which monumentality and harmonic structures are highlighted, along with his use of colour as a physical entity, bringing him to occupy his own place within the History of Art.

Spain's representative in the XXX Venice Biennial (1960) and a member of the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando since 1995, Gerardo Rueda's weight lies not just in the importance of his work but also in his contribution, along with Fernando Zóbel and Gustavo Torner to the creation of Cuenca's Museo de Arte Español Abstracto, a key point for the dissemination of new aesthetic proposals developed in Spain in the 50s and 60s and which had a notable influence on subsequent generations of artists.