Jorge Castillo Untitled, 1986

New York and Barcelona-based Jorge Castillo (b. 1933, Madrid) is a celebrated Spanish surrealist artist. After training at Madrid's San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, he relocated to Paris in the late 1950s, where the influence of Picasso and Miró shaped his acclaimed visual language, characterized by poetic distortions and dynamic forms.

Castillo gained international recognition early in his career, exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1964, where he won the International Drawing Prize. Exploring cubist fragmentation and surreal biomorphism, his practice is an ongoing dialogue with art history and the subconscious, reinventing traditional figure-ground relationships and often dissolving clear boundaries between form and space. 

Castillo contributed this lithograph to the Anniversary Portfolio of Galeria Joan Prats, a renowned contemporary art gallery in Barcelona founded in 1976 by Joan Prats i Camps. The print exemplifies his distinctive surrealist style with a rhythmic repetition of figures and motifs in an echoing visual vocabulary that explores gradations of time, movement, multiplicity, and fragmentation of identity within a suspended, continued metamorphosis.

At the time of this print in 1986, Castillo was well-established internationally and his monumental steel sculpture Homage to the Cyclist was installed that year in Barcelona's Plaça de Sants, where it still stands, commemorating Spain's oldest cycling race, the Volta a Catalunya. This period can be explored further in the contemporaneous monograph published in 1991 by Rizzoli, Castillo: Vision and Form.