BIOGRAPHY

 

José Iranzo Almonacid "ANZO"

(1 January 1931 – 4 March 2006)

 

Anzo was born in Utiel in 1931 and moved to Valencia with his parents at an early age. When he was five years old, they settled down in the neighbourhood of Sant Bult. Already back then, religious paintings by an artist living in the ground floor of the same house were already shaping his perspective of the art.

 

At Escolapios, where he attended a secondary school thanks to a scholarship, Anzo exposed his first artworks – the illustration on the school's bulletin board. His father wanted him to study "something serious," which made him prepare for an entrance exam to the Barcelona Institute of Architecture. During that time, he was also attending classes at the Valencia School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts. After being accepted to the school in Barcelona, he moved out from Valencia and started taking classes at the new school. However, in 1954 he left the Institute in order to immerse himself fully in the arts.

 

Anzo belonged to a group of Valencian artists, which emerged during a long post-war period, in the middle of the Franco's regime. In his own artistic production of that time, Pop Art played an increasingly important role. He began experimenting with different embossing processes, clearly influenced by an economic development and by changes in cultural dynamics of the time. A new world created by mass media where television images were becoming very influential opened a new artistic door for Anzo. He introduced Pop Art to the Valencian community and also became one of the most important artists of this style in Spain.

 

Anzo was led by his urge to combine science and art. His goal was to enforce a message about a reality, which served as a rich source of inspiration for his new creations. This new tendency took him further away from Pop Art and brought him closer to what was know in Europe as Mec Art. In enthusiasm about the use of new materials, Anzo began a new series of paintings known as Isolations.

 

The 1980's are considered as the beginning of his last phase. After finishing his inner struggle with work on Isolations, he began a new phase known as Lyrical Geometry. A poetic sensitivity could be glimpsed in the apparent coldness of geometric lines when we rediscover colour and poetry. We are looking at works of art which – still being linked to abstraction – offer an optimistic vision. Anzo himself put it this way: "I think the beauty arises from a balance between the mathematical and the lyrical."

 

In 2003, when he has already been retired for a few years, he received the Premio de las Artes Plásticas de la Generalitat Valenciana. The death of his wife as well as other personal circumstances brought him to a process of introspection. Eventually, a long illness took his life in 2006.