Claudio Bravo was born in 1936 in a farmers family in Valparaiso, but from the age of eleven he showed an important vocation for art through drawing. Even being self-taught, he spent time studying drawing and painting with Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, focusing on the perfectionist realistic technique. Furthermore, during this time he combined painting with poetry, ballet, and theater.
At the age of 17 he exhibited for the first time, in Salón Trece (Santiago de Chile), and he began to make a name for himself as a portrait painter in Concepción. His interest about portrait drives him to Madrid, increasing his technique through the observation of Museo del Prado masters’, like Velázquez. It was in the Spanish capital where Bravo became famous with his portraits, established since 1961, he painted a lot of aristocracy and nobility people. But in the mid-1960s the portrait gave way to still life, through everyday objects, expanding his technique until it practically brought it to perfection. It should be noted that his work was always generated from the observation of reality, calling himself super-realistic and avoiding the term hyper-realistic, since this second uses photography as a model.
His still lifes gave him international acknowledgement, and he took the leap of Spanish galleries to United States galleries. One of the firsts galleries was Staempfli Gallery in New York, where he usually exhibited in the seventies coinciding with his move to Tangier in 1972. Thanks to an individual exhibition in 1981 in Galeria Marlboroug, the gallery who represented him until the rest of his life, his internationality was consolidated. He lived in Marrakech since 2000, alternating his residence between this city and Tangier.
Along of his career he exhibited in more of fifty galleries, as well as institutions like Museo de Bellas Artes of Santiago or Elvehjem Museu of Art of University of Wisconsin, just as in some editions of Documenta in Kassel.
List of artworks
Paquete negro , 1972
Pan tostado , 1974
Rodrigo , 1977
Rodrigo , 1977
Paquete negro , 1972
Pan tostado , 1974
Rodrigo , 1977