Gerardo Rueda was the founder of the so-called Cuenca Group, together with Gustavo Torner and Fernando Zóbel. The three of them participated in the creation of the Spanish Museum of Abstract Art that so powerfully influenced the formation of the next generation of plastic artists.

Rueda’s career is defined by clarity and perfection of composition, and the structuring of form in space. Geometric figures seem to bend to his desires, although this does not prevent him from exploring new expressive fields in which material ends up taking on an exclusive prominence.

His beginnings were self taught, in spaces inherited from Cubism. He later moved towards abstraction with a constructivist trend, while at the same time reducing his chromatic range in an inexorable tendency towards monochrome. In his last period, his painting, always structured in planes and spots, ended up so radically purified that it was reduced to the application of wide coats of only one color with slight alterations on the surface.

Color was always his great obsession, even in the early stages of his career, when the harmony of planes suspended in space was the leitmotiv of his work.

Volume appeared in his painting during the 1960s, when he added to his pictorial surfaces materials that turned them into much more than mere painting. Pieces of wood, packs of cigarettes, matchbooks . . . . all superimposed on the canvas in colourful collages that foretold the natural process of the conquest of the third dimension.

Painting, sculpture, printing . . . . Even the design of stained glass windows for the Cathedral of Cuenca gives proof of his versatile ambition. Gerardo Rueda is, without a doubt, one of the keystones of the Spanish Vanguard during the second half of the twentieth century. A master of masters of contemporary Art.