Rodrigo Moynihan

Descripción del Artista

Rodrigo Moynihan (1910-1990) was born in Tenerife, Spain in 1910 to a Spanish mother and an English father. The family moved briefly to London before relocating to New York, where he graduated in 1927. After attending the Slade School of Art in London in 1928-31, Moynihan started a pioneering movement in painting called Objective Abstraction, together with a small group of artists that included Ivon Hitchens and William Coldstream. Their works were concerned with the medium itself, emphasizing painterly strokes, and were in their way a precursor of Abstract Expressionism that prompted the poet David Gascoyne at the time to describe them as an ‘explosion in a jam factory.’ Examples of these can be found at the Tate, the Hirshhorn Museum and other institutions around the world. During the war, Moynihan served in the British Army before being recruited as an official war artist through the support of Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery in London. This established Moynihan as the premiere portrait painter in the United Kingdom, and led to his appointment as the head of painting at the Royal College of Art soon after the war. Under Moynihan’s auspices, the Royal College became the hub of the British art world, as Francis Bacon occupied Moynihan’s studio, and Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake and David Hockney were students. But Moynihan, always restless and never comfortable being pigeon-holed, soon was going back to abstraction. From this point forward, he would oscillate between abstraction and figuration with a distinct fluidity as Gerhard Richter and others would later do. Throughout his career, Rodrigo Moynihan’s work was exhibited in London by the Redfern Gallery, Leicester Galleries, Faggionato Fine Arts, Hanover Gallery, Fischer Fine Arts, and Karsten Schubert; in New York, by Charles Egan Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and Robert Miller Gallery; in Paris by Galerie Claude Bernard. His work appears in the collections of the Tate, London; Royal Academy of Arts Collection, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., amongst many others.

Exposiciones en las que ha participado como artista

Studio Paintings, 1970s & 1980s

Individual