Painter
Claudio Bravo
“Tangier has an absolute Mediterranean light.” A master of hyperrealism, Claudio Bravo lived for almost forty years in Morocco, whose light and landscapes shaped the second half of his work.
The artist
Career
Born in Valparaíso, Chile, on 8 November 1936, Claudio Bravo trained with the painter Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, his only academic teaching, and exhibited in Santiago at seventeen. A sought-after portraitist in Madrid in the 1960s, he painted Manila’s high society in 1968 and moved to New York in 1969. In 1972 he chose Tangier for its light and climate and bought a house in the medina; a winter residence in Marrakech followed, then a house north of Taroudant, where he died on 4 June 2011.
The real, sublimated
Heir to Velázquez, Zurbarán and the Spanish still lifes of the Golden Age, Bravo pushed realism to trompe-l’œil and Caravaggesque chiaroscuro. Still lifes, portraits and his famous “packages”, wrapped fabric and paper rendered with dizzying precision, make up a body of work in which the humblest object takes on an almost metaphysical presence. In Morocco his models were the men around him, and its landscapes, he wrote, had “something biblical”.
Landmarks
- 1954 — First exhibition, Salón 13, Santiago
- 1963 — First exhibition in Spain, Galería Fortuny, Madrid
- 1970 — First New York exhibition, Staempfli Gallery
- 1972 — Settles in Tangier
- 2000 — Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise, Spain
- 2004 — “Claudio Bravo et le Maroc”, Institut du monde arabe, Paris
- 2011 — Dies in Taroudant
Collections
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Museum Ludwig, Cologne
- Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
- Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago
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In the same spirit
Discover works by Khalid Mohamed El Karkouri, Mohamed Jaamati and Mohamed Toumi, or browse all Moroccan paintings for sale.
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