
Antonio Bueno
"I worked for a very long time on each painting, with the aim of delving ever deeper into the stylistic problems that interested me.
I didn't work either to have exhibitions or for posterity. Yet I worked... As if the time available to learn was never enough"
Antonio Bueno was born in Berlin in 1918 to Hannah Rosjanska and Javier Bueno, a Spanish journalist-writer and correspondent for the ABC newspaper in Madrid. After his childhood spent in Spain he moved with his family to Geneva, attending high school and the Academy of Fine Arts until exhibiting at the Salon des Jeunes in Paris at the age of twenty. In January 1940 he arrived in Florence together with his brother Xavier and then remained there for his entire life. Although at the beginning his style was influenced by the Florentine Renaissance so much so that the painting of his early years appeared excessively realistic, almost artificial or fictitious, he subsequently moved away from Realism to experiment with other currents and styles: starting from Abstractionism in collaboration with Numero, a magazine Avant-garde by Fiamma Vigo, he arrives at metaphysical visions through compositions of plaster pipes and eggshells which in 1958 will be exhibited in successful exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the 1960s Bueno was among the protagonists of the Florentine avant-garde movements precisely through the use of eclectic expressive techniques such as art-entertainment and audio-painting. Since 1969 he definitively returned to figuration, giving life to a completely personal and particular iconography of female faces, sailors and bullfighters, that is to say all subjects that he continued to practice until his tragic death in Fiesole on 28 September 1984.

Female portrait
1978
Oil on hardboard
20 x 30 cm