Manolo Millares

Manolo Millares, born Manuel Millares Sall on 17 January 1926 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, was self-taught as an artist. No biographical source documents any formal art school training or degree. He was introduced to Surrealism around 1948 and, in 1950, participated in founding LADAC (Los Arqueros del Arte Contemporaneo), whose first exhibition was held at the Museo Canario in Las Palmas. His first solo exhibition on the Spanish mainland followed in 1951, at Galeries Jardi in Barcelona, alongside his participation in the 1st Biennial of Hispano-American Art in Madrid that same year.

In 1953 he settled in Madrid, and by the mid-1950s he had begun working with burlap and sackcloth, tearing, stitching, and encrusting the material into dense, wound-like compositions. In 1957 he co-founded the El Paso group with Antonio Saura, Rafael Canogar, and Luis Feito, and held a solo exhibition of his burlap works at the Ateneo de Madrid. That same year he showed burlap works at the IV Bienal de Sao Paulo, an appearance that contributed to the Museum of Modern Art's early interest in his work; the specific acquisition history is not fully documented in accessible public sources. In 1958 he represented Spain at the 29th Venice Biennale alongside Antoni Tapies, Eduardo Chillida, Rafael Canogar, and Antonio Saura. In 1959 the dealers Pierre Matisse and Daniel Cordier began representing him, and in 1960 he held his first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and a solo show at the Daniel Cordier gallery in Paris, the same year his work appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's New Spanish Painting and Sculpture and in Before Picasso, After Miro at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Millares died on 14 August 1972 in Madrid, Spain, at the age of 46.

Millares's critical standing was established early and through major institutions rather than through a long trail of press reviews. Frank O'Hara, writing for the Museum of Modern Art's 1960 exhibition New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, described the artist's shift toward torn and stitched canvas surfaces built up with burlap, whiting, and paint into raw, bandage-like encrustations. His participation in the 1957 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1958 Venice Biennale, together with gallery agreements with Pierre Matisse and Daniel Cordier in 1959, place him among the small group of Spanish Informalist painters, alongside Antonio Saura and Antoni Tapies, who secured international museum recognition within their own lifetimes. Later writers, including the critic Alfonso de la Torre, have read his Homunculo series as evoking figures of mourning and fallen bodies, a continuation of the material and bodily language that runs through the burlap works.

Manolo Millares has a substantial, long-running auction presence. Per Artprice, his works have come up for sale at public auction on the order of several hundred occasions; per Appraisily, 182 tracked lots show a median realized sale of about USD 16,731. Aggregated market data from MutualArt puts his highest reported realized price at USD 1,380,597 for a painting and USD 340,421 for a sculpture, but the specific work, auction house, sale location, and sale date behind that top figure are not identified in accessible public sources, and no publicly reported 2023 to 2026 sale has been documented above it. Collectors should treat that top figure as a reported ceiling rather than a fully verified single-lot record until a specific sale can be matched to it.

Millares is a historically significant, institutionally validated painter with deep auction liquidity, hundreds of tracked lots, but a top-end price record that is not yet fully documented with a matched work, house, and date in accessible public sources. No catalogue raisonne is independently confirmed, so provenance research and verification through Galeria Mayoral, his principal representing gallery, matter more than they would for an artist with a settled reference catalogue. Collectors should also be aware of a documented discrepancy in some gallery literature over his birth year, 1926 is the year given by the largest number of independent sources and should be treated as authoritative, with 1928 noted only as a minority variant.