Biography

José Antonio Fernández-Muro was born in Madrid in 1920. In 1937, fleeing the Spanish Civil War, he traveled with his family to Buenos Aires, where his father had business interests. In 1940 he began to study drawing and painting in the academy of the Catalan painter Vicente Puig, to which assisted many Argentine artists in the decade of 1930’s. There he met who would become his future wife, Sarah Grilo, whom he married in 1944. That same year he had a solo exhibition in the Witcomb Gallery in Buenos Aires. His work at this period is figurative in character; later on, along the decade of the 50’s, he began leaving behind his figurative tendencies to get more involved in what was going to be his abstract work.

In 1947, already the father of two children, Veronica and Juan Antonio, the couple decided to travel to Europe, and at first they resided in Madrid with the idea of travelling later on to Paris. This didn’t become possible when they could not continue to receive money from Buenos Aires, as Perón, Argentina’s president, forbade the exportation of foreign money outside of the country.

The Fernández-Muro family returned to Buenos Aires in 1950. There, they met some of the Spanish intellectuals exiled from the Franco regime, like Rafael Alberti. In 1952, Fernández-Muro participated in the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina (GAMA) under the guidance of Aldo Pellegrini. This group consisted of different types of concrete artists; on one side Fernández-Muro, together with Sarah Grilo, Miguel Ocampo, and Hans Aebi. Even though their trajectory was quite brief, they participated in two very significant international Art Fairs: one of them in the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, which later was presented in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

In 1958, Fernández-Muro received a fellowship of Museology from UNESCO. His wife, Sarah Grilo, joined him in his trip and they traveled together for eight months, visiting the most representative museums in Europe and the United States. In 1959, the OEA in Washinton D.C. organized for Fernández-Muro an individual show, and in the two following years he received a prize by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and by the Torcuato di Tella Institute, exhibiting in both Institutions and in the Institution of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, among others.

In 1962 Sarah Grilo was granted a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the whole family traveled to New York, where they resided for eight years, alternating life in this city with the house they designed and built in Marbella, Spain. Their graphic and painting art was influenced by their urban surroundings: footsteps on the streets, manhole covers, city water systems covers, from which Fernández-Muro stamped and then translated onto his paintings through an arduous process on silver paper. During those years he took part of the inaugural show of the Andrew Morris Gallery in New York in 1962, and participated in several other exhibitions: From Concrete Art to the New Tendency (1963); Argentina in the World. Visual Arts 2 (1965); Four Sculptors, Two Painters (1963); Magnet: New York (1964); two solo exhibitions at Galería Bonino in New York (1965 and 1967); The Emergent Decade (1966); Latin American Paintings from the Solomon R. Foundation Museum (1969); Latin American Paintings and Drawings from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan (1970); Looking South: Latin American in New York City Collections (1972).

The Fernández-Muro family definitely abandoned New York in 1970, when they decided to reside in Europe. In 1980 Fernández-Muro and his wife Sarah Grilo bought a studio in Paris and they alternated between their stays there and their studio in Madrid.

In 1989 they decided to reside permanently in Madrid until the death of Fernández-Muro in March 2014. His wife, Sarah Grilo, died in August of 2007.