Guadalajara, Spain, 1932 —
Bernay, France, 2014

Francisco Sobrino was born in 1932 in Guadalajara, Spain and died in 2014 in Bernay, France. In 1946, he left for Argentina to study at the National School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and met, among others, Horacio Garcia Rossi and Julio Le Parc. He moved to Paris in 1959 and co-founded with them as well as François Morellet, Joel Stein and Yvaral the GRAV (Group for Research in Visual Art) in 1960. Francisco Sobrino explored the use of new materials such as Plexiglas and stainless steel that he assembled in complex constructions based on a vocabu­lary of simple geometric forms.

He was included in many exhibitions, in particular at the Grand Palais in Paris for Dynamo in 2013, at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (Texas) in 2012 and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia (Madrid) in 2007. His work is featured in numerous museum collections such as the National Museum of Modern Art – Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Tate Collection in London, the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and the Hirchhorn Collection (Washington). In 2015, a Francisco Sobrino Museum was inaugurated in Guadalajara, where the artist is originally from.