Claudio Bravo

Born in Valparaíso, Chile on 8 November 1936^[1], Bravo trained in Santiago under Miguel Venegas Cienfuegos before establishing himself in Madrid in the 1960s as a portrait painter to European and Latin American aristocracy. It was fashionable work and he was good at it. The decisive shift came in 1972^[1], when he left Spain for Tangier, drawn by the quality of Moroccan light and the peculiar freedom of a city that had always attracted people running from somewhere else. He never returned to portraiture.

In Morocco, he painted packages and folded cloth for decades, acknowledging his debts to Zurbarán and Velázquez without apology. His work was represented by Marlborough Gallery across New York, Madrid, and London from the early 1970s, and large wrapped-package canvases were selling for over a million dollars at Christie's New York by 2008^[1]. A retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago in 2009 cemented his standing in Chilean^[1] cultural history.

He died in Taroudant, Morocco on 4 June 2011^[1], having donated substantial works to Chilean^[1] state collections. The Fundación Claudio Bravo in Tangier manages his estate. His packed-paper canvases remain some of the most technically demanding still-life paintings of the twentieth century.