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Biography

Jorge Rando (1941- Malaga, Spain)

Jorge Rando is a Spanish painter and sculptor who enjoys recognition as one of the major exponents of Neo-Expressionism on an international level. German and Central European culture were crucial to shaping him during the most important stages of the development of his art and life. The synergy between his philosophical understanding and painting sees them come together in a language of great expressive power and an artistic output which voices a summons for the return of spirituality to art. A painter of major subject-based cycles on which he works for years or decades, leaving them to one side and then coming back to them in an intermittent relationship which, as the painter himself asserts, he will maintain until his life’s end.

Biography 

Jorge Rando was born in Malaga in 1941, a coastal city in the south of Spain. 1936 saw the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and boat-loads of rebel troops arrived at the port of Malaga from the north of Morocco. Faced with the bombardments many local residents decided to flee the city. Jorge’s mother, who was on the verge of giving birth to her firstborn, Salvador, accompanied her husband along with thousands of soldiers and civilians who were retreating and fleeing along the main coastal road from Malaga to Almeria. An exodus of children, women and men formed an endless human chain which would come to be known as the “Desbandá”.

His family headed for Valencia where they were taken in by the Magistrate at the city’s Court of First Instance, and they did not return to Malaga until soon after the end of the war, in 1940. One year later, in a country immersed in post-war hardship, Jorge Sánchez was born, on St John’s Eve. He would subsequently adopt his maternal surname, Rando. His family had been torn apart during the conflict, one part had fought for the Republicans and another for the Nationalists. Some died in the bombing, others at the front, and others were imprisoned. His parents did not want to pass on the ghosts of war to their children, preferring to educate them in love and forgiveness for their fellow humans. Values which would make their mark on the personality of the young Rando.

Even as a child he was especially concerned about everything relating to the arts and humanities; a voracious reader, he liked to write and was forever making sketches, with the latter revealing his natural talent. His mother took advantage of his artistic skills to ask him to make drawings for the birthdays and anniversaries of friends and family, which she would frame to make gifts of them, and by the time he was 16 he had undertaken a large-scale mural measuring 20m by 3m. 

1950 – 1960

In 1950 he gained a place at the Gaona Institute and started to study for his Baccalaureate at the Colegio de las Mercedes in Malaga. This period saw his father move to Madrid for work, leaving his wife and four children in Malaga. Jorge Rando, along with his siblings, used to travel up to the capital to see their father. On one such trip they were able to visit the Prado. Coming face to face with the works of great masters of painting such as Velazquez, Goya or El Greco had a tremendous aesthetic impact on him.

His vocation for helping others led him to the desire, at a very young age, to join the Missionaries in Africa, who were popularly known as the “Padres blancos”, or white fathers. These were carrying out missions on the continent with the unusual additional factor of living in the same conditions as the natives.  Following this decision he entered the Malaga Diocese Seminary. This period would leave an indelible mark on the course that his life and art would take. The long hours given over to study would enable him to acquire a deep understanding of subjects such as philosophy and theology, which would end up becoming the pillars of his artistic ethos. It was at the Seminary that he discovered texts from the Bible and others written by scholars such as Saint Teresa of Jesus and, above all, Saint John of the Cross.
His faith is reflected in the “Religious Painting” cycle, which he embarked on at the end of the 1970s. He was the first artist to depict the entire Passion, from Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem up to his Crucifixion and Resurrection. His works in which green and magenta are dominant depict a blindfolded Christ, a symbol of man’s humiliation and suffering. Rando was the first Catholic artist to exhibit his religious works at the central headquarters of the Evangelical Church in Hannover and, since then, a painting of his stands over the chapel of the EKD (German Evangelical Church).

During his time at the Seminary he studied German texts in depth. His reading ranged from idealism with names including Kant and Hegel, through the literature of Schiller, Lessing and Goethe, to Romantic writers such as Schlegel, Novalis and Eichendorff, planting in him the seed of a desire to examine their writings more deeply and gain a greater understanding of humanistic and existential matters. That desire started to meet resistance in the unyielding walls of the Seminary, and that city immersed in a Spain whose doors were closed to freedom and where art was reduced to costumbrist painting, now seemed small to him. The young Rando’s unique spirit of initiative led him to travel to that nation of thinkers, to the land of philosophers and poets, whose artists had fought for Art’s individual soul.

1960 – 1970

Jorge Rando was just 20 when he arrived in a Germany still licking its wounds from the Second World War. He settled in Cologne and started to work in restoration and as a trainee welder, skills he would subsequently develop in the creation of his sculptures. In 2007 he created a sculptural installation which would make up the first outdoor museum in Malaga, and which can be visited in the Nasrid gardens of the city Cathedral. 

In these early years he lived in a little studio in a neighbourhood in Cologne’s old town. On the city’s streets the locals rubbed shoulders with prostitutes and tramps, whose portraits the artist would start to paint tirelessly. Due to the size restrictions of his room he worked primarily in watercolours and Indian ink. No works survive from this period due to the fact that the painter either gave them away, sold them for next to nothing or simply lost them.
At the end of the 1960s Jorge Rando acquired a workshop and started to work with a palette knife, painting his famous Clochards (urban tramps), this currently being one of the few real portraits painted by the artist. At the same time he was working to reflect the stories and lives of the prostitutes to whom he would end up dedicating a cycle in the 1990s titled Prostitution.

In 1963 he enrolled at the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) in order to broaden his studies in philosophy. These were intense years in which he tackled the relationship between philosophy and artistic expression. He toured the cities of Germany attending seminars and conferences such as that of Professor Blocherer in Munich. During this period he visited museums, galleries and art centres, gaining a deeper understanding of the Expressionist movement. On one such trip to the city of Berlin he visited Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà, and the figure of the mother with a shaft of light falling on her grief, had such a visual impact on him that he would end up dedicating a cycle to the work bearing the title The Passion of Käthe Kollwitz. 

In 1967 he took up permanent residence in Cologne. With the restoration skills he had acquired and with the intention of reuniting the art world he embarked on the restoration of the old part of the city which still showed the effects of the Second World War. He inaugurated a number of premises, including the Strickstrumpf, considered the embodiment of jazz in Germany and the first venue with live music daily with concerts by bands from New Orleans and performances by great musicians such as Dexter Gordon, and which would soon become the meeting place for the artists and intellectuals of the day. In 1968 he opened the first Flamenco Tavern in Germany at number 8 Salzgasse Street. The venue would play host to the biggest names in Flamenco music such as Paco de Lucía, Camarón de la Isla and Paco Cepero. 

The 1960s in which Jorge Rando was living in Germany was the decade of freedom fights, the hippy movement, decolonialization, the start of political change in Latin America, and of that month of May 1968 which the painter attended along with a group of intellectuals. He spent these years continually travelling around the world, mainly by train or boat. These long journeys provided him with inspiration for his works and writing. But there was one turning point in the creation of his African art cycle. This was the start of one of his most impactful and shocking cycles which he would continue to work on intermittently over time under the title Afrika. 

1970 - 1990

In 1972 he opened the first Rock-Center in Germany with the groups Rockmac and Groovy Inspiration. What he wanted was to create a Music Factory to combat the criminal price policy affecting the public and musicians alike. The artist worked hand in hand with the famous DJ Eric Jomes.  During this period of his life he also enjoyed other interests such as football and his great passion, speed racing, participating in Rally competitions. The artist continued to live in Cologne and started to exhibit his work in galleries in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. During this time he also put on shows in Spanish cities such as Barcelona, Madrid and his home town of Malaga. In 1979 he married Margit, whose face and striking long red hair would become recurring motifs in his work, as seen in his cycle of Portraits.

In the early 1980s the couple decided to distance themselves from the frenetic lifestyle they maintained in Germany, settling between the city and their country house in Malaga. Great animal lovers they shared their home with their eight dogs, surrounded by nature. During this period Jorge Rando shut himself up in his studio and closed himself off from cultural circles other than his contact with the Künstleratellier 21 group in Cologne which had been founded by the artist Evelyn Sion – and decided not to put on any more exhibitions. These years saw him immersed in study, and his artistic evolution began to raise itself up as an irreducible summons for spirituality to be restored to art, an ethos to which he dedicated a large number of texts. It was a period in his life in which his cycles mixed and intermixed pictorially, with other cycles also emerging, such as Children or Maternities. 

As of the 1990s he returned to the European cultural world with exhibitions in Malaga, Barcelona, Madrid, Cologne and Hamburg as well as taking part in Contemporary Art Fairs. In 2003 he set up a studio in Hamburg where he could paint during his stays in Germany. This period produced cycles such as Miniatures and Vertical Horizons.

1990 – 2018

2014 saw the publication of the book Thoughts and Reflexions of Jorge Rando. His pictorial work has been studied by prominent figures from the European cultural scene, with the publication of numerous catalogues and books which may be consulted at the world’s major libraries, museums and universities, such as the Library of Congress in Washington, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Princeton University Library, the National Library of Spain, the National Institute of Art History in Paris, Chicago’s Columbia College, Yale University, the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden, the German National Library, Madrid’s Complutense University, the Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the University of Salamanca.

In recent years his artistic output has turned into a journey of introspection with which to narrate his own spiritual and philosophical condition through painting, with cycles such as The Birth of Colours, New Dawns will be Born and Beauty Cries with Tragedy.

His shows in Paris, Lisbon, Strasburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Emden, Madrid, Barcelona, New York and Ratzeburg (where the exhibition’s success led the Barlach Museum to dedicate a permanent room to the artist), to mention just a few, along with the prestigious awards he has won in the past decade, the most recent being the Ernst Barlach Prize 2016, have consolidated his position as one of the most important exponents of Neo-Expressionism at international level.
In 2014, in recognition of his artistic legacy, the City Council of Malaga, the town of his birth, decided to dedicate a museum to him in which to house his work. It is currently the first and only museum of Expressionism in Spain, and has become a meeting point for painters, sculptors, musicians and intellectuals. At the express request of the painter, the museum has an Atelier which is open to painters wanting to explore Expressionist languages of the 21st century.
On 1 December the museum was the venue chosen by the artist for the proclamation of his Manifesto: The Contemporary Arts Testament, in which he made public his vision of art and culture in modern society. The Manifesto has received the support of renowned figures from the European cultural scene.

Alongside his solo exhibitions, on 16 June 2016 the Cervantes Institute of Hamburg presented “Ernst Barlach-Jorge Rando: Expressionism Yesterday and Today”, an ambitious project at international level organised by the Ernst Barlach Museum in Hamburg in conjunction with the Jorge Rando Museum. In 2017 the show started its tour in Emden and Brandenburg as one of the most prominent cultural events marking the 5th Centenary of the Reformation in Europe, ‘Reformations Jubiläums 2017’. At the end of its German tour the exhibition will travel to Latin America.

In March 2018 the museum presented the exhibition “Qi Baishi – Jorge Rando: An Encounter”, a cultural dialogue between East and West. The Qi Baishi Museum of Fine Arts, dedicated to China’s most important modern painter, and one of the most highly-prized artists in the world, officially opened its exhibition of the work of the Chinese artist in the West, his first exhibition outside China, in an encounter with “the force and spirituality of the work of Rando” as affirmed by Chinese authorities. This year Jorge Rando has also been interviewed by CCTV (Chinese Central Television) Documentaries, as a benchmark figure of Western painting, and has been invited to provide Chairs at the prestigious Hunan University of Art and the Chinese Oil Painting Academy. In November 2018, before touring a number of cities on the Asian continent, his work will represent world Expressionism at the Qi Baishi International Art Fair.

On 14 May 2019, Jorge Rando became the first Western painter to have his work exhibited at the Qi Baishi Memorial Museum, the cultural institution devoted to the most important modern painter in the People’s Republic of China, with the major exhibition titled The Light of the Mediterranean Reaches China receiving critical acclaim. Prominent academics such as Wu Hongliang, Vice Dean of the Beijing Fine Arts Academy, Director of the Art Museum of Beijing Fine Arts Academy and Director of the Chinese entry at the Venice Biennale, declared that “Rando’s work not only possesses broad humanistic erudition and deep philosophical thinking, but also pays greater attention to the search of the artistic spirit and the emotions that arise directly from the heart. When we observe his work, we can sense that the artist is both learned and sincere. The work of Jorge Rando is work that can be breathed in.”

The Malaga-born artist’s work is currently on show in the prestigious collection of the Fine Arts Academy and the Qi Baishi Memorial Museum, being on permanent display at both museums.

Jorge Rando currently lives and works between Malaga and Hamburg, giving masterclasses at prestigious universities across the globe, conveying the spirituality and humanism of New Expressionism. He recently gave post-graduate courses at the University of Fine Arts in the Hunan Province and at the National Academy of Oil Technique Fine Arts in Beijing.