Mateo Manaure

Manaure was born on 18 October 1926 in Uracoa, in the state of Monagas, Venezuela. From 1941 to 1946 he studied at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas y Artes Aplicadas in Caracas, where he trained in graphic arts under Pedro Angel Gonzalez and studied under the school's director, Antonio Edmundo Monsanto. In 1947 he won the Premio Nacional de Artes Plasticas at the VIII Salon Oficial, a prize that supported further study and travel and placed him among Venezuela's most closely watched young painters.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Manaure lived and worked in Paris, where he became a founding member of Los Disidentes, the circle of Venezuelan artists and intellectuals who published a manifesto rejecting the academicism of the Caracas art establishment in favor of abstraction. Back in Caracas, he co-founded Galeria Cuatro Muros with sculptor Carlos Gonzalez Bogen in 1952 and organized what is generally described as Venezuela's first international exhibition of abstract art there. Through the 1950s and 1960s he became a central figure of Venezuelan geometric abstraction, exhibiting locally at the Museo de Bellas Artes and internationally at the Venice Biennale in 1956.

His most enduring public work is a large body of murals, polychromies, and stained and vitreous glass panels created for the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, developed as part of Villanueva's integrated arts program alongside artists such as Alejandro Otero and Victor Vasarely. He is often credited with one of the largest vitreous glass murals in the world, generally identified with his Avenida Libertador mural in Caracas. He later served as president of the Asociacion Venezolana de Artistas Plasticos in 1984 and received that organization's Premio Armando Reveron in 1994. A museum dedicated to his work, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Mateo Manaure, opened in Maturin, Monagas, in 2009. Mateo Manaure died on 19 March 2018 in Caracas, at the age of 91.

Manaure is consistently framed by both journalistic and market sources as one of the leading figures of mid-century Venezuelan geometric abstraction. Reporting his death in 2018, El Pais described him as the painter of the "iconic murals of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas" and a "maestro del abstraccionismo en Venezuela." Christie's, in its 2013 catalogue note for Composicion No. 1, described him as "one of the leading exponents of mid-century Venezuelan geometric abstraction." The recurring critical thread across Venezuelan and international sources is his dual identity as both an easel painter working through abstraction and a public muralist whose work is inseparable from Villanueva's architectural vision for the Central University of Venezuela.

Manaure's auction market is small and concentrated in Latin American art sales rather than a broad international circuit. His all-time auction high is Composicion No. 1, an oil on wood painted in 1956, which sold for USD 118,750 at Christie's New York on 20 November 2013 in a Latin American art sale, a result Christie's identified at the time as a world auction record for the artist. No dossier source identifies a later sale exceeding that price. Public auction activity for Manaure appears limited in volume, so any single result should be read in the context of a thin, sporadically traded market rather than as evidence of a smooth price trend.

No catalogue raisonne for Manaure has been identified, and no gallery or foundation could be confirmed as currently representing his estate; his work has been exhibited in Caracas by venues including Reset Gallery and has previously been submitted to market platforms by Mark Hachem Gallery, but neither relationship is documented as an exclusive or ongoing representation arrangement. Verification of individual works should rely on the museum and institutional record, including the Galeria de Arte Nacional, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, and the artist's dedicated museum in Maturin. His auction record is modest in absolute terms and thin in volume compared with better-documented peers of his generation, so collectors should treat his market as still being established rather than mature, and should weight provenance and institutional exhibition history heavily when evaluating a given work.