Abel Martín

Abel Martín (Mosqueruela, Teruel, 1931-Madrid, 1993) was an expert screen printer. After working in various trades, he moved to Paris in 1958 following in the footsteps of his brother Florencio. There he met a group of young artists such as Salvador Victoria, Lucio Muñoz, Pablo Palazuelo or Eusebio Sempere… With Sempere he would establish a close friendship and artistic collaboration until the end of his days. Together they learned the technique of screen printing in the workshop of Cuban artist Wifredo Arcay, a learning process "slow and full of small secrets", while printing works by the artists of the Denise René Gallery: Jean Arp, Auguste Herbin, André Bloc or Victor Vasarely.

Already in Madrid, both of them set up a workshop to print the first artistic screen prints in Spain. A complex book by Lucio Muñoz with textures with sands attracts, due to its perfection, commissions from other artists, especially those gathered around the Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca: Antonio Saura, Fernando Zóbel, José Guerrero, Manuel Millares, Hernández Mompó, Gustavo Torner or Gerardo Rueda. Abel became a reference in the craft of screen printing with great quality in the production of prints and beautiful books that came out of the workshops in Cuenca first and from his workshop in Madrid later. Many are the screen prints that we know he printed, although we do not know the exact number or for how many artists he worked. Thanks to the donations of Florencio Martín and the deposits of the ARS Citerior collection, generously, we deepen our knowledge.

From 1968 to 1972, Abel Martín printed his own screen prints, barely twenty works in three portfolios titled Metempsicosis with texts by Tomás Marco; Musical, with text by Enrique Delgado and six musical scores and Networks with a short story by Florentino Briones, in addition to a series of individual screen prints. In all of them he works from geometry, on the plane or on the curve, through programming languages very close to the Computing Center of the University of Madrid, in whose seminars he actively participates, assuming from then on, the collaboration between artists as a form of transversal and enriching creation.