Equipo Cronica Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Equipo Crónica (in Spanish Group/team-chronicle) and Crónicas de la realidad (Chronicles of reality) are two terms that designate a group of Spanish pop art painters, active from 1964 to 1981. It was founded by Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and Juan Antonio Toledo. Read the full biography

Equipo Crónica (in Spanish Group/team-chronicle) and Crónicas de la realidad (Chronicles of reality) are two terms that designate a group of Spanish pop art painters, active from 1964 to 1981. It was founded by Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and Juan Antonio Toledo. Equipo Crónica moved away from informalism to cultivate figurative painting within the limits of pop art. It started from the critical analysis of the Franco regime and the history of art and was inspired by works such as Guernica by Pablo Picasso and Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. From this comes to life a mixture of realism, criticism and pop, with pictorial encounters, anachronisms and bittersweet pastiche. All with enthusiasm but little joy due to the shadow of the regime on all the works of Equipo Crónica. Paintings and silkscreens parodied the portraits of Velázquez used at that time in the billboards of Manuel Fraga's Ministerio de Información y Turismo. Faced with the grandiose and picturesque image that the Franco regime wanted to give of Spain, the painters of Equipo Crónica used irony. Equipo Crónica produced large-scale paintings, sculptures and prints in series. Among the museums that host their works, we remember the IVAM in Valencia and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.