Antonio Bueno

Old Sisters at the Balcony - Lithograph by Antonio Bueno - 1990s

1990s

Antonio Bueno was born in Berlin on July 21, 1918, to Hannah Rosjanska and the Spanish journalist writer Javier Bueno, a correspondent for Madrid's ABC Newspapers. After spending his childhood in Spain he moved with his family to Geneva, attending high school and the Academy of Fine Arts. He exhibited at the Salon des Jeunes d'Avenir in Paris at the age of 20. In 1940, he arrived in Florence with his brother Xavier, the city where they both stayed for a lifetime. In the beginning, his style was influenced by the Florentine Renaissance and his painting was very realistic and finished, later he moved away from realism to experiment with other styles, starting from abstractionism in collaboration with Numéro, the avant-garde magazine of Fiamma Vigo. He then arrived at metaphysical visions through compositions of plaster pipes and eggshells which in 1958, he exhibited at New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the ‘60s, Bueno was among the protagonists of the movements of the Florentine avant-garde, experimenting with various expressive techniques, such as art-show and audio painting. From 1969 he returned definitively to figuration, giving life to a particular iconography of female faces, sailors and bullfighters, subjects that would continue over the years until the last season of Après ski. Right in the middle of that fortunate creative phase, Bueno died in Fiesole on September 26, 1984.