House of Manolo Millares and Elvireta Escobio

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Memory spaces · Year: 1953

In a house on Galileo Street, near Las Canteras beach, the artists Elvireta Escobio (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1932) and Manolo Millares (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1926- Madrid, 1972) lived during their early years of marriage. 

This home close to the sea became, between 1953 and 1955, a lively meeting place where friends linked to the art world gathered, defending innovative aesthetic concepts. Among those who passed through were: the sculptor Martín Chirino, freshly graduated from the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid and beginning to create his abstract sculptures of visceral forms; the painter and renowned poet Manuel Padorno, who was already establishing himself in the field of lyric poetry with his own voice closely linked to the surrealist movement; the painter José María Benítez, who would later move to Venezuela; the sculptor Tony Gallardo; and the painter, illustrator, and photographer Alejandro Reino, who at that time was collaborating in the launch of the Radio Atlántico station, where he would broadcast jazz and avant-garde music. From these intellectually charged meetings came suggestions for exhibitions, poetry readings, and even the publication of modest magazines. Such was the case with the almost artisanal magazine Astil, which openly opposed what they considered "outdated classicism". 

But for all of them it was essential to leave the Islands and broaden their fields of action in the art world. In the early 1950s, Millares had some prestige as an avant-garde artist in the Archipelago and had already exhibited in some foreign galleries. It was in September 1955, with the 13,000 pesetas obtained from selling the furniture of their house, that the Millares couple, together with Chirino, Padorno, and Reino, embarked from the Port of La Luz on the ship Alcántara bound for the Peninsula in search of new and wider horizons.

The Millares settled in Madrid and soon Manolo was considered one of the most promising talents of Spanish informalism. In 1957 the Canarian artist founded, together with the most relevant creators of modern art in Spain at the time (Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Suárez, Antonio Saura, Pablo Serrano…), the group El Paso, of enormous importance in the configuration and definition of the Spanish artistic avant-garde of the moment. During the 1960s and until his death in 1972, Manolo Millares, with his burlap works and his set of abstract pieces, achieved the highest recognition in the international art world.

During the sporadic returns of the Millares couple to Las Palmas, Las Canteras beach was an inevitable point of reference, always linked to the artist's life: from his birth, childhood, youth, and newlywed period, to his final moments, when in the summer of 1971, a year before his death, he suffered a severe fainting spell while walking along the beach promenade with his young daughter in his arms. It was the first evident symptom of the serious illness that would end his life.

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